Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
The birds awoke with little whispered confidences, small twitterings and chirps. A faint lavender tint melted the stars in the eastern sky. Shadows crept beneath the trees, and we knew it was time to start. Just as the light defined the margins of the trail, we picked up in the grayness the track of a lion.
"Edna is really very good-natured," thought Bessie gratefully, as she sauntered happily through the leafy lanes. How delicious the air felt! It was June, and yet there was still the crispness of the spring. She felt as though she and the birds had this beautiful world to themselves, and the twitterings and rustlings in the thicket were the only sounds that broke the Sabbath stillness.
I could not say whether they were migratory or not, but if the former they were making their northern stay a late one. Their twitterings reminded me of the time when I used to go at nightfall, 'when the swallows homeward fly, and listen to the music without melody as the birds exchanged their greetings, told their loves, and gossipped of their adventures.
Now and then twitterings in the tree tops might have been heard; were heard, in fact, by Harriet Burrell, but not heeded, for her gaze was fixed, as it had been for some moments, on two tiny specks of light far out on the dark sea. One of the specks was green, the other red. They rose and fell in unison, now and then disappearing for a few seconds, then rising, high in the air, as it appeared.
Out of the forest came the droning of the wood-crickets, the last twitterings of the day birds, and the beginning of night sounds. A great shadow floated out over the river close to the bateau, the first of the questing, blood-seeking owls adventuring out like pirates from their hiding-places of the day.
Now night was coming on, and the larks were passing from the pasture, where they seemed to spend most of the day, some with song and some with sputter, over the road, to drop into the grass and be seen no more; "While through the blue of the sky the swallows, flitting and flinging, Sent their slender twitterings down from a thousand throats."
So they separated, and in a few short moments four white-robed figures were tucked snugly under the coverlets, the lights turned out, and the two doors left ajar that the sleepy exiles might hear the strains of music floating up the wide staircase. There was the soft sound of whispered words from bed to bed like the sleepy twitterings of birdlings in their nests, and then silence.
They danced and feasted and sang, until the camp-fires smouldered and died out, and the night birds made their last faint twitterings before seeking rest. They sang and feasted and danced when all else was still save the Grey Bull River, murmuring as it swept along over its gravelly bed, the far off hoot of an owl, or the cry of the coyote still lingering for his share of the wedding feast.
As he sat eating, in at the window came all manner of little sounds twitterings and sighings and warblings and rustlings, and all the little voices said together: "'We are the sounds of the open. We are the birds in the russet meadow, and the whispering of the orchard trees, the cheep of the crickets in the long grass, and the whole humming, throbbing voice of out-of-doors.
If it was bad at the table, it was worse when they all sat in the front porch after dinner, with nothing to do but watch the darkness settle slowly down over the valley, and listen, to the last sleepy twitterings of the birds. They talked little as they sat there.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking