Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 24, 2025
His mother sang: "'The mother hen her wings doth sink, The cock stands on one leg to think: That grey goose Steers high her course; But sure am I that never she As clever as a cock can be. Run in, you hens, keep under the roof to-day, For the sun has got leave to stay away, says the cock." But the little birds were sitting on the ridgepole, singing.
They look as if they had sat down and leaned back to take their ease; and they are all neat and clean-looking, and have rows of flower-beds from the gate to the front door. I never saw a house built with such a steep angle to its roof as this has," said Mercy, looking up with the instinctive dislike of a natural artist's eye at the ridgepole of the old house.
We started in pitch darkness and for three hours rode through a night so black that I could not see my pony's ears. The trail, which in places was barely a foot wide, ran for miles along a sort of hogback, the ground falling sheer away on either side. It was like riding blindfolded along the ridgepole of a church, and, had my pony slipped, the results would have been the same.
After observing the tinman for a while, I put on rubber shoes and slunk up to the ridgepole, the very watershed of my sixty-foot kingdom, my legs slanting into the infinities of the North and South. It sounds unexciting when written, but there I was, astride my house, up among the vents and exhausts of my former cloistered life, my head outspinning the weathercock.
"I knew a girl in Marysville who could walk the ridgepole of a roof." "I don't believe it," said Josie flatly. "I don't believe anybody could walk a ridgepole. YOU couldn't, anyhow." "Couldn't I?" cried Anne rashly. "Then I dare you to do it," said Josie defiantly. "I dare you to climb up there and walk the ridgepole of Mr. Barry's kitchen roof."
In certain of the Dyak tribes the heads are treated with profound reverence, being wreathed with flowers, offered the choicest morsels of food, and sometimes being given a place at the table, while in other tribes they are hung from the ridgepole and displayed as trophies of the chase.
Immediately beneath both ends of the ridgepole there is a small opening in the grass through which the smoke of the cooking fires is supposed to escape.
And so, admiring the roses and the pomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with some dusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as not saw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the State House, calling attention to his patriotic self in his tri-colored dress by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole.
There was plenty of time to think and write, and here the better part of "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers" were written. He had no neighbors, no pets, no domesticated animals only the squirrels on the roof, a woodchuck under the floor, the scolding blue jays in the pines overhead, the wild ducks on the pond, and the hooting owls that sat on the ridgepole at night.
The name of the owner was inscribed on the corner of each house; and there appeared to be but two surnames, at most three, in the whole village. One new but unfinished house seemed to have been built from the ridgepole downward, instead of in the usual order. There were no doorways or stairs or apertures for communication between the stories, which were two in number.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking