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Updated: May 26, 2025
She led the way into the "best room," a sunny, square room, carpeted with a faded and patched rag carpet, and papered with a horrible white-and-green-striped wallpaper, where a few ghastly effigies of dead members of the family hung in variously sized oval walnut frames. The house resounded with singing, laughter, whistling, tramping of boots, and scufflings.
Then, almost before the sound of the second blast had died away in the distance, there again arose those strange moaning and wailing sounds in the air, seemingly right overhead, louder and more prolonged this time, and accompanied by queer shuddering rustlings of the topsails and momentary scufflings of conflicting draughts of air about the decks.
The poultry house door was shut- locked- but the noises within were more and more frightful- of convulsive cocks and hysterical hens, mingled with human scufflings and hushes and snortings and snigglings that made the elders call out in various tones of remonstrance and reprobation, "Boys, have done! Come out! Open the door."
The constant changes of boundary of these tiny lordships, the hazy character of the powers possessed by their rulers, the multiplicity of free townships yielding obedience to none but their own civic rulers, the brief but none the less tyrannous rule of scores of robber barons who exercised a régime of blood and iron within a radius of five miles of their castellated eyries, render the tracing of the history of the Rhine during the Middle Ages a task of almost unequalled complexity, robbed of all the romance of history by reason of the necessity for constant attention to the details of dynastic and territorial changes and the petty squabblings and dreary scufflings of savage barons with their neighbours or with the scarcely less brutal ecclesiastical dignitaries, who, joining with gusto in the general mêlée of land-snatching, served to swell the tumult with their loud-voiced claims for land and lordship.
The whole agitation, with its dim confused scufflings against law and order, and its demonstrations idiotically recurring at the most inopportune moments, had profoundly vexed him. Years ago he had received the bland assurance of his ministers that the whole thing would soon die down and cease; but it was still going on, and was now taking to itself worse forms than ever.
This was certain scufflings and scratchings and squeakings in the walls and behind the skirting boards. She knew what they meant, because Becky had described them. They meant rats and mice who were either fighting with each other or playing together.
Thus there once came to the mouth of the hole scufflings, and the noise as of an eager, inquisitive crowd rats, who hoped for a chance to get their own back on a detested foe. But one evil snarl from the wounded beast removed them, convinced that the time was not yet.
Upon every hand there were rustlings and whisperings, tiny footfalls and scufflings among dead leaves and twigs; and here and there, as the great grey, shadowy Wolfhound swept along between the white tree-trunks, he had glimpses of rabbits, bandicoots, kangaroo-rats, and many of the lesser marsupials, all busy about their different night affairs, all half-paralysed by amazement at his passage through their midst.
One bit, hard and many cornered as it seemed, somehow gained entrance to the bed, and greeted Cuckoo's every movement with uncompromising grittiness. No shaking of coverlet and sheet, no beating of pillow, no kicks and scufflings could expel it. The bed seemed full of hard bits of toast, and Cuckoo felt as if an additional burden were laid upon her by this slight evil.
The young lady teachers "showed off" bending sweetly over pupils that were lately being boxed, lifting pretty warning fingers at bad little boys and patting good ones lovingly. The little girls "showed off" in various ways, and the little boys "showed off" with such diligence that the air was thick with paper wads and the murmur of scufflings.
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