"Clucking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by a hoarse shouting, jingled out of the shadow. When they stopped with a jerk in the full moon-glare beside the fountain, it became evident that they were attached to a coach, a spidery coach tilted forward as if it were perpetually going down hill; from inside smothered voices like the strangled clucking of fowls being shipped to market ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... been shifted and now lay along in the snow. There, too, lay the body of the dragoon I had shot, crumpled up in his death-agony. A brood of owls were clucking and cluttering about under the hovel, and there, too, leaning against the rear wheel of the wain, were a lumpish wagoner and our surly host. The one was stolidly smoking, the other was holding the battered lantern out at arm's length, and I could, as it were, see ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... a long green-house, and on the other stood a barn, with a sleek cow ruminating in the yard, and an inquiring horse poking his head out of his stall to view the world. Many comfortable gray hens were clucking and scratching about the hay-strewn floor, and a flock of doves sat cooing ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... of the South, came over the hill and on its crest the wild turkeys were still clucking to each other. Henry, through sheer energy and flush of life, ran up the slope, and watched them as they took flight through the trees, their brilliant ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of them. After the expectation which the faces of the three expressed had lasted for several minutes, the two maids re-entered, accompanied by their master, the Justice. The first was holding aloft a roomy basket of wickerwork, in which some hens were anxiously clucking and flapping their wings. She put it down in front of the Sexton, who glanced into it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... little market gardens and poor plots of land, women stooped over their cabbages, and old men tended the fruits of the earth. On one patch a peasant girl stood with her hands on her hips staring at her fowls, which were struggling and clucking for the grain she had flung down to them. There was a smile about her lips. She seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the feathered crowd. Did she know the Germans were coming to Paris? If so, she ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... couldn't tell what had come over the old place to make it look so small and mean. It was just as if the walls of the rooms had been the bellows of a concertina and somebody had suddenly shut them. But there was the long clock clucking away on the landing, and there was Sir Thomas Traddles purring on the hearth-rug, and there were the same plates on the dresser, and the same map of Africa over the fireplace, with a spot of red ink where ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... Hal and Ned, and was told that they had gone out after a flock of wild turkeys that had been heard clucking in the pecan trees, not far from camp. They had taken their guns with them, and expected ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... day and the doors of the carriage house and the big door of the barn were wide open. Mary-'Gusta could hear the hens clucking and the voices of people talking. The voices were two: one was that of Mrs. Hobbs, the housekeeper, and the other belonged to Mr. Abner Hallett, the undertaker. Mary-'Gusta did not like Mr. Hallett's voice; ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... plenty, as Christmas came on. And though some other parts of the market might be more amusing and exciting, where the cocks and hens, and geese and ducks, were all to be heard gabbling, and quacking and clucking and crowing, for instance; or the railed-in place where there were generally a few calves or poor little frightened sheep bleating and baa-ing, yet the little girl's first thought was always the flower corner. First thing on Thursday ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth
... any of them took so much as a green apple he would be liable to "death or some such less punishment as the Act shall provide." They talk about it and grumble, and then suddenly, without any warning except a clucking and scratching, the Mess Sergeant is seen by the greater part of the Battalion to issue triumphantly from a farm gate with two or three fat hens under his arms. Smiling broadly, totally ignorant of the enormity of his conduct, he deposits his load in the mess-cart ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... the advance is of course the most exciting. You make a dash for a kopje, probably uncertain if it is held or not. The clucking of the old Mausers at long range warns you that it is, and a few bullets kick the dust up. The squadron swing to the right to flank the kopje, and the fire gets hotter and the whistle of bullets sharper and closer. Suddenly the welcome report of a gun, followed by a ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... slight clucking sound from beside him and when he turned he found O'Shaughnessy lying almost beside him, squinting along his carbine. The Narakan's face split into two replicas of the map of Ireland and he saluted flat handed, his webbed fingers at just the ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... he said. "Hark! I hear some curious clucking sounds. There's more than one bird there, or I am much mistaken." Stepping forward he peered over the branches, when he beckoned us to advance, and, he lifting me in his arms, I saw not only a hen turkey in the pen, but a brood of a dozen or more turkey poults ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... not a little subtilty (and double-dealing too, I fancied,) regarding my own country, and of things present, and things real. In fact nothing, I think, so much flattered his vanity—unless it was my wonder at Dame Partlett's clucking on his viol-strings—as to learn himself was famous even so far as to ages yet unborn. He gazed on the simple moon with limpid, amiable eyes, and ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... was very proud of her fine family; for the eight little daughters were all white and very pretty. She led them out into the farmyard, clucking and scratching busily; for all were hungry, and ran chirping round her to pick up the worms and seeds she found for them. Cocky soon began to help take care of his sisters; and when a nice corn or a fat bug was found, he would step back and let little Downy or Snowball have it. But ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... first place she had become excellent friends with the farmer and had persuaded him to delegate to her a number of his duties. She had to collect the newly laid eggs, hunt up stolen nests, inspect and feed the clucking, quacking, gobbling personnel of the barnyard which came ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... wear herself out," she said, not to herself but to an old blue hen who was scratching around the hollyhocks, clucking loudly. The hen had a motherly air, having launched so many families, and Mrs. Buck felt instinctively ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... was a human foot and crumbling indications of a boot, but no signs of a body. A hay rick, half ashes, stood near the centre of the gorge. Workmen who dug about it to-day found a chicken coop, and in it two chickens, not only alive but clucking happily when they were released. A woman's hat, half burned; a reticule, with a part of a hand still clinging to it; two shoes and part of a dress told the story of one unfortunate's death. Close at hand a commercial ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... what they meant, for he came very near breaking from a limp into a trot several times, under the stimulus of all that clucking and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... place; that it is she who ought to worship the man, and not the man her; and when she becomes properly conscious of her destiny, has not he a right to be conscious of his? If the grey hens will stand round in the mire clucking humble admiration, who can blame the old blackcock for dancing and drumming on the top of a moss hag, with outspread wings and flirting tail, glorious and self-glorifying. He is a splendid fellow; and he was made splendid for some purpose surely? Why did Nature give him his steel-blue ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... like sleigh-bells in winter; whips in the hands of fierce-eyed carters cracking round the heads of large, sad mules; hooters of automobiles and immense motor diligences blaring; men shouting at animals; animals barking or braying, snorting or clucking at men; unseen soldiers marching to music; a town clock sweetly chiming the hour, and, above all, rising like spray from the ocean of din, high voices of Arabs chaffering, disputing, arguing. This was the "Arabian Night's Paradise" that ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... silence for a few seconds, except for the startled clucking of the fowls. Then a heavy bass voice ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... Bickersdyke's eyes, which even in their normal state protruded slightly, now looked as if they might fall out at any moment. His face had passed from the plum-coloured stage to something beyond. Every now and then he made the clucking noise, but except for that he was silent. Psmith, having waited for some time for something in the shape of comment or criticism ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... festooned the boughs of the trees in the orchard and on the lawn. From the barn-yard back of the farmhouse a chorus of sounds was rising. Pigs were grunting and squealing, cows were mooing, a donkey was braying, ducks were quacking, hens were clucking, roosters were crowing. ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... goblin When they spied her peeping: 330 Came towards her hobbling, Flying, running, leaping, Puffing and blowing, Chuckling, clapping, crowing, Clucking and gobbling, Mopping and mowing, Full of airs and graces, Pulling wry faces, Demure grimaces, Cat-like and rat-like, 340 Ratel- and wombat-like, Snail-paced in a hurry, Parrot-voiced and whistler, Helter skelter, hurry skurry, Chattering like magpies, Fluttering like pigeons, Gliding like ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... day in June when David believed he never in this world could get through with it. He heard the chuck and drowsy clack of the sprinkling-wagon as it ponderously advanced upon its lazy way; he heard the almost whispered clucking of a mother-hen who was calling her chicks to come shuffle with her in the cool loose earth under the shade of the crooked old apple-tree, and presently there came a time when the out-of-doors was all so still that even the falling of a shadow ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... the dwelling. Between them a high timber gate opens upon the scattered pasture lands of the hills; opposite to this and across the farmyard, which is the lounging-place of scores of red-necked turkeys and of matronly hens, clucking to their callow brood, another gate of similar pretensions opens upon the wide meadow-land, which rolls with a heavy "ground-swell" along the valley of a mountain river. A veteran oak stands sentinel at the brown meadow-gate, its trunk all scarred with the ruthless cuts of new-ground ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... homestead a profound quiet reigned. There was the occasional rattle of a collar chain to be heard proceeding from the barn; the clucking of a foolish hen, fussing over a well-discovered worm of plump proportions, sounded musically upon the air, and in perfect harmony with the radiant, ripening sunlight. A stupid mongrel pup stretched itself luxuriantly upon the ground in the ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... old elm you may see their hives, filled, too, with luscious honey. There is the well, with its old sweep, and the "moss-covered bucket," too; and look at the corn-crib, and the old barn—and what a noisy set of fowls around it, cackling, clucking and crowing, as if they owned the soil; and how the pigs are scampering through the clover-field; ah! the little wretches, they have stolen a march, or rather a caper; at them, old Jowler, at them, my fine fellow, you will soon turn them back to their pen, obstinate ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... The clucking noise came nearer, passed them within a yard, and was already some distance away towards the reef when the sailor burst into a hearty laugh, none the less genuine because of the relief it ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... up to the blue sky, and looking as peaceful as though there were no stormy winds or waters in the world to toss them. Amongst these water-lilies a moorhen had built her nest, and presently she came clucking out right under Arthur's feet, followed by ten or a dozen little hurrying black balls, each tipped with sealing-wax red. She looked very happy with her brood—as happy as the lilies and the blue sky—and the sight made him savage. He took up ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... buy at a flower-store and cork up in a bottle. Well, I guess—Git up, Bess!" and he flopped the reins once more along the ridges and hollows of the mare's back while he encouraged her to renewed efforts with that peculiar clucking sound heeded only by ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... chicken, startled by his silent approach, sprang out of the hedge and fluttered in front of his wheel, clucking madly. Grey pealed his bell, but it had no effect on the distracted chicken, which seemed bent on destruction. He clutched his brake; it would not work. There came a stifled squawk, and a ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... want it?" she asked enticingly. The General waved his arms and legs wildly; wreathed in smiles, he opened and shut his mouth in quick alternation, chirping and clucking, as she held it up before him; an ecstatic wriggling pervaded him, and he chuckled unctuously. A moment later only his deep-drawn, nozzling breaths could be ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... familiar to her from the days when she had been carried thither on Mr. Bates's arm, making little cawing noises to imitate the rooks, clapping her hands at the green frogs leaping in the moist grass, and fixing grave eyes on the gardener's fowls cluck-clucking under their pens. And now the spot looked prettier to her than ever; it was so out of the way of Miss Assher, with her brilliant beauty, and personal claims, and small civil remarks. She thought Mr. Bates would not be come ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... a coming and going of French and English soldiers. It was market-day and the Grande Place (not very grand) was crowded with booths and old ladies in black, and young girls with checkered aprons over their black frocks, and pigs and clucking fowls. Suddenly the people scattered, and there was a rumble and rattle of wheels as a long line of transport wagons came through ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... he said, swinging the cultivator back into place and clucking to Solomon to go ahead. "I can't eat green rocks, you ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... wandered toward the thin yellow band that was visible on the horizon, marking the flight of day. Above his head shone the stars. From the other homes, which were scarcely visible, resounded the neighing of horses, barking and the clucking of fowl,—the last signs of animal life before it sank to rest. That primitive man felt an impression of emptiness amid the Nature which was insensible and blind to the sufferings of its creatures. Of what concern to the points of light that looked down upon him from above could be that which ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... she was sorry for them. "Every brood," she declared, "should have at least one swimmer in it." She began to strut up and down the edge of the duck-pond, clucking in a most overbearing fashion. Really, she had never felt quite so important before—not even when her first brood pecked their ...
— The Tale of Henrietta Hen • Arthur Scott Bailey
... I do sometimes wish I had not quite so many aunts. They are all very good to me, and I want to please them; but they are so different, I feel sort of pulled to pieces among them," said Rose, trying to express the emotions of a stray chicken with six hens all clucking ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... like an old hen clucking after her duckling in the water," he replied. "She has been fretting and fuming after you all the week. If it had been me out in Sark, she would have slept soundly and ate heartily; as it was you, she has ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umbellus), which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... past, nevertheless it soothed and pleased him. He was in sympathy with this homely life; it belonged to him and was dependent on him; it made him honest returns for his care. Moreover, it was agreeably linked with the past. There were quiet cows which his wife had milked, clucking biddies which she had lifted from nests with their downy broods. He looked at them wistfully, and was wondering if they ever missed the presence that he regretted so deeply, when he became conscious ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... was small except the hopes that she was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks just out of the egg. The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple boughs, and there was one little home of straw so hung that Lyddy could look into it and see the patient mother brooding her nestlings. The sight of her bright eyes, alert for every sign of danger, sent ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was too complicated; and, besides, she had so entirely cheered up that she practically forgot death. She began to count how much money her mother owed her for eggs—which reminded her to look into the nests; and when, in spite of a clucking remonstrance, she put her hand under a feathery breast and touched the hot smoothness of a new-laid egg, she felt perfectly happy. "I guess I'll go and get some floating-island," she thought. "Oh, I hope they ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... line of dark Spanish oaks from which the sharp pointed acorns were dropping, darkest green oaks, shut out the shore. A thousand starlings were flung up into the air out of these oaks, as if an impatient hand had cast them into the sky; then down they fell again, with a ceaseless whistling and clucking; up they went and down they came, lost in the deep green foliage as if they had dropped in the sea. The long level of the wheat-field plain stretched out from my feet towards the far-away Downs, so level that the first hedge shut off the fields beyond; ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... chose this crisis to indulge in a return of his artistic temperament. Not an inch would he budge. "What shall I do?" wailed Katherine, when all her clucking and ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... at her with wide and woful eyes, in which she conjectured—erroneously, as it happened—hunger for warmth or food. Under these circumstances, what could be done by a woman who was conscious of owning a redly glowing hearth with a big black pot, fairly well filled, clucking and bobbing upon it? To possess such wealth as this, and think seriously of withholding a share from anybody who urges the incontestable claim of wanting it, is a mood altogether foreign to Lisconnel, where the responsibilities of poverty are no doubt very imperfectly ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... unpretentious house, set about with great trees and encircled in meadow and field rich with the promise of harvest; the fragrance of the pink and the hollyhock in the front yard was mingled with the aroma of the orchard and the garden, and the resonant clucking of poultry and the hum of bees. Inside was ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... is one of those inscrutable mysteries peculiar to the naming of birds which are so frequently called precisely what they are not. In spite of the compliment implied in associating the name of one of our finest songsters with it, the rusty blackbird has a clucking call as unmusical as it is infrequent, and only very rarely in the spring does it pipe a note that even suggests the sweetness of ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... clucking sound with his tongue. That was a sore topic of conversation, and he always tried ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... spring, and after a cessation at the end of summer, are the two periods at which fowls begin to lay. When the period of laying approaches, it is known by the redness of the comb in the hen, the brightness of her eyes, and her frequent clucking. She appears restless, and scratches and arranges the straw in her laying place, and at last begins to lay. She generally prefers to lay in a nest where there is one or more eggs; hence it is of use to put a chalk egg into the nest you ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... once gets into the bathroom!" Floss sat up in bed, her eyes still closed. She made little clucking sounds with her tongue and lips, as a baby does when it wakes. Drugged with sleep, hair tousled, muscles sagging, at seven o'clock in the morning, the most trying hour in the day for a woman, Floss was still triumphantly ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... him!' said Mrs. Grayson softly. They both sat silent, looking into the fire. Through the open door, the hens could be heard pecking and clucking in the yard, and the rushing of a beck swollen by the rain, on the fell-side. Presently ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... strove, in a gush of good-will, to distinguish the surrounding summits, and, on the top of the belvedere could be heard the clucking of the Peruvian family, pressing around a big devil, wrapped to his feet in a checked ulster, who was pointing out imperturbably, the invisible panorama of the Bernese Alps, naming in a loud voice the peaks that were ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... made a "clucking" sound with his tongue. It was his way of expressing irritation. Then he stood erect, and glanced round the room in search of some one. He was a tall, well-built man and carried his fifty odd years fairly ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... would have hurried to comfort and humor. "I want to do what's right, I'm sure;" and her red under lip began to tremble and the water to gather in her eyes. She sat down to hear the rest of the lecture, but her mother stopped short. Presently, when the chickens came clucking, she went to mix their meal as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... and fro; house-serfs sauntered through the mud, stood still and scratched their spines meditatively; the constable's horse, tied up to a post, lashed his tail lazily, and with his nose high up, gnawed at the hedge; hens were clucking; sickly turkeys kept up an incessant gobble-gobble. On the steps of a dark crumbling out-house, probably the bath-house, sat a stalwart lad with a guitar, singing with some spirit ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... all right. He poked his beak at it, and with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos to Mars, and then sketched in the ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... animal nature announces a case of two hens, who by joint efforts hatched one chick. They have since, for some weeks, been parading the yard, each clucking and manifesting all the anxiety and care of a true mother over this one. The hens never quarrel, or show the least appearance of jealousy ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... proper name for so marvelous a place," said Ojeda after he had tried to pronounce the clucking many-syllabled word. "Is it like anything you have ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... shining hair brushed neatly back and parted down the middle, her large flat face always composed and placid, and her voice never raised above a whisper. The only sign that she ever gave of disturbance was a little clucking noise that she made in her mouth like an aroused hen. Peter's time in the little pink sitting-room was sometimes exceedingly short and he used to make the most of it by shooting questions at the good lady at an astonishing rate, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... balanced herself on the edge of the table and Gallito bent forward and scratched her head, making little clucking noises in his throat the while: "Our guest is a great poker player, Lolita, he understands how to make a bluff, but," again that single grating note of a laugh, "assure him, my Lolita, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... might say exactly the same of the captain and Violet," pursued Betty, in a lower tone, and glancing toward that couple, as they sat side by side on the opposite sofa—Violet with her babe in her arms, the captain clucking and whistling to it, while it cooed and laughed in his face—Violet's ever-beautiful face more beautiful than its wont, with its expression of exceeding love and happiness as her glance rested now upon her husband and ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... the hollow—and the grassy hillsides folded one upon another—and the gleam of a lake among them—and on the furthest verge of the kind familiar scene, the blue and shrouded heads of mountain peaks. She dropped her head on her knees, and could hear the lowing of cattle and the clucking of hens; she saw the meeting-house roof among the trees, and groups scattered through the lanes on the way to the prayer meeting, the older women in their stuff dresses and straw bonnets, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... amid the straggling ailanthus shoots; near the wood-pile there was a wheelbarrow half filled with chips, and at a little distance the axe was poised upon a rotten log. From the small coops beside the hen-house came an anxious clucking as the fluffy yellow chickens strayed beneath the uneven edges of their pointed prisons and made ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... same instant that they descended from the street level, the barkeeper with his tongue had made a small clucking sound, thrice repeated, and with all four fingers of his right hand had gripped the left lapel of his unbuttoned waistcoat. Thereat there had been a general raising of heads all over the place. Since the days of Jonathan Wild and ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... evening, Mrs Mason collected "her young ladies" for an inspection of their appearance before proceeding to the shire-hall. Her eager, important, hurried manner of summoning them was not unlike that of a hen clucking her chickens together; and to judge from the close investigation they had to undergo, it might have been thought that their part in the evening's performance was to be far more important ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Jung himself, seated in the place of the mahout, guiding the elephant which he bestrode very cleverly. When silence was required he made a peculiar clucking noise with his tongue; whereupon these docile creatures immediately became still and motionless: one would drop the tuft of grass which he was tearing up, another would stop instantly from shaking the dust out of the roots which he was preparing to eat, others left off chewing their ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... times looking toward the house and lowing. The fowls made a colored patch on the dung-heap before the stable, scratching, moving about and cackling, while two roosters crowed continually, digging worms for their hens, whom they were calling with a loud clucking. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the four appreciated to the full: a long, low room with a French window standing wide open to the garden just a step or two below. On the evening breeze wafted in the scent of mignonette and flowers, and the low sleepy clucking of the hens, about to go to roost. Near the window stood the table, with a silver kettle boiling merrily on its stand, and fruit and flowers and pretty china in abundance, all looking as dainty and tempting as heart could desire. There was an abundance too of more substantial fare, eggs ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... set resolutely about the task of remarshaling her awkward squad. With a soft, clucking sound she moved hither and thither. A feather or two drifted lazily about in the air. At last she gathered them in, all but one foolish, blank-eyed gander, which, poising on a large boulder, threatened to dive headforemost into the torrent. She coaxed him gently, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... to go right through the flock of chickens, but Cousin Jack was a careful driver and didn't harm one of them. There was a terrific squawking and peeping and clucking as the absurd bipeds ran about in an utterly bewildered manner. The children and Cousin Ethel managed to count them fairly well, but Cousin Jack had to ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... It came at regular intervals for a while, then stopped and began again. What could it be? It was not the noise of a woodpecker, nor that which a beaver makes with its tail. Chuck! chuck! chuck! It was not the clucking of a grouse, though perhaps more like that than anything else, but different, somehow, in quality. Chuck! chuck! chuck! I think we all knew in our hearts that it had ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... thorough scrutiny, began the strangest talking Sarka had ever heard. The crater-Gnomes seemed to communicate by making strange clucking sounds with their tongues, sounds which were unmusical and discordant, and which, as the Gnomes who stood back from them, because already the two were covered until no more could cling to Jaska or Sarka, joined in the speech—mounted in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the summer before, she had been gone for weeks. Nor was Babbitt one of the detachable husbands who take separations casually He liked to have her there; she looked after his clothes; she knew how his steak ought to be cooked; and her clucking made him feel secure. But he could not drum up even a dutiful "Oh, she doesn't really need you, does she?" While he tried to look regretful, while he felt that his wife was watching him, he was filled with exultant visions ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... spring Jonathan had loved to caress and cuddle up the little rolls of yellow and black down; but now that they were great stalking, ragged fowls, putting on all sorts of airs, they excited his ridicule, and he longed to tease them, and the last year's brood of clucking hens and crowing roosters, that didn't quite know what to make of ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ridiculously small native breed. These rode atop the loads: their feet were tied to the cords and there they swayed and teetered and balanced all day long, apparently quite happy and interested. At each new camp site they were released and went scratching and clucking around among the tents. They lent our temporary quarters quite a settled air of domesticity. We named the cocks Gaston and Alphonse and somehow it was rather fine, in the blackness before dawn, to hear these little birds crowing ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... deep in breakfast dishes, and the two girls had gone out into the foggy dooryard with the chickens' breakfast. A flock of mixed fowls were clucking and pecking over the bare ground under the willows. Martie held the empty tin pan in one hand, in the other was a half-eaten cruller. Sally had turned her serge skirt up over her shoulders as a protection against the cool air, exposing a ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... true, would mutter "shocking!" And give her head a sorrowful rocking, And make a clucking with palate and tongue, Like the call of Partlet to gather her young, A sound, when human, that always proclaims At least a thousand pities and shames; But still the darker the tale of sin, Like certain folks, when calamities ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Thoughtlessly my kind old master Brings again a guest to stay here; What a thorough devastation Will he make in my good larder! Now farewell, you lovely brook-trout, Which I had reserved for Sunday, When the Dean of Wehr will dine here. Now farewell, thou hough of bacon! The old clucking hen, I fear much, Also now must fall a victim, And the stranger's hungry horse will Revel ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... Cambridge had taken himself off, with a mind which was too intent upon the high things of antiquity to stoop to consider the four-pence which he owed for bed and board. It was the shrill out-cry of the landlady when she found her loss, and the clucking of the hens, which had streamed in through the open door, that first broke in upon the slumbers ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shanty, I see the guide like a hen that has lost a chicken, shaking her wings, and clucking, and making a great ado. I could stay here all day. I would like to stay two or three—to see how it would look at sunrise, at sunset—to lie down in one of these sunny hollows, and look up into ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a little on his elbow, then, to the girls' surprise, a whole farm-yard seemed to have entered the ward. They could hear a sheep bleating, a duck quacking, a dog barking, hens clucking, a cock crowing, and a pig uttering a series of agonized squeals. It was a most comical ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf, with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh hissings and rattlings and gurglings. There was no apparent reason why it should all or any of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... folded, bound with red tape and sealed with bright red wax,—an object which, to my certain knowledge, had no more business among my belongings than the knives and plates that the conjurer snatches from the surrounding atmosphere, or the hen which he evolves, clucking, from ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... his mistress, made no reply. Rigaud looked from one to the other, struck his ugly nose, and made a clucking with his tongue. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... close and hot. The southern wind had died away. There was scarcely a sound in all the landscape save the regular clucking of the wagon-wheels, the soft, rhythmical tread of the horses' feet, and the snapping buzz of the grasshoppers rising from the weeds. Far away to the west lay the blue Coteaux, thirty miles distant, long, low, without break, like a wall. The sun was hidden by ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... has a tail like a pheasant. It is a very remarkable bird with stiff feathers, and flies with difficulty on account of its small wings. The swamp-pheasant has not the family weakness of the cuckoo, for it does not lay its eggs in the nests of other birds. It has a peculiar clucking voice which reminds one of the sound produced when water is poured ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... bright, and warm, And one to lead you thither from the storm And lurking dangers, yet you turn away. And, thinking to be your own protector, stray Into the open jaws of death: for, see! An owl is sitting in this very tree You thought safe shelter. Go now to your pen." And, followed by the clucking, clamorous hen, So like the human mother here again, Moaning because a strong, protecting arm Would shield her little ones from cold and harm, I carried back my garden hat brimful Of chirping chickens, like white balls of wool, And snugly housed ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... leaves of the Manitoba maples trembled ever so little in the still air. The sun was setting, and fleecy fragments of cloud were painted ruddy gold against the silver background of the sky. From the barnyard came the contented sighing of the cows and the anxious clucking of a hen gathering in her belated brood. The whole country seemed bathed in peace—a peace deep and unpurchasable, having no part in any ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... called her chicks about her, and went her way, clucking merrily, while they picked up bugs, and dared to peep once more when they found a ...
— The Little Brown Hen Hears the Song of the Nightingale & The Golden Harvest • Jasmine Stone Van Dresser
... full of yearning love! It is the voice of the mother hen. Presently a faint, timid "Yeap!" which almost eludes the ear, is heard in various directions,—the young responding. As no danger seems near, the cooing of the parent bird is soon a very audible clucking call, and the young move cautiously in the direction. Let me step never so carefully from my hiding-place, and all sounds instantly cease, and I search in vain for either parent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... cave mouth stood six feet from the sea. The sea ran up into the cave in a deep triangular channel, with a landing-place (a natural ledge of rock) on each of the sides, and the sea entrance at the base. The sea made a sort of clucking noise about the rocks; and at the right inland it washed upon a cave-floor of pebbles, which clattered slightly as the swell moved them. The roof dripped a little, and there were little pools on both the landings, and the whole ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... this effectually is to give the upper proprietors of rivers such an interest in the Salmon fisheries as will make them worth attention. At present this is far from being the case. Now the upper proprietors are merely considered as so many clucking hens, whose business and whose duty it is to hatch Salmon for the proprietors of fisheries at the mouths of rivers, who do not in many cases spend a farthing in their protection when spawning, and who grievously begrudge the upper proprietors ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... fixed on my face, grew very wide and grave. I could only press her hand in parting for Grandpa, growing impatient, had succeeded in clucking Fanny ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... hills the sky is flushing with rose and amber. A long line of gulls goes wailing inland; the rooks come cawing and sporting round the corner at Landcross, while high above them four or five herons flap solemnly along to find their breakfast on the shallows. The pheasants and partridges are clucking merrily in the long wet grass; every copse and hedgerow rings with the voice of birds; but the lark, who has been singing since midnight in the "blank height of the dark," suddenly hushes his carol and drops headlong among the corn, as a broad-winged buzzard swings from some wooded peak ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... custom. If they wish to deceive the ears of the great Falcons who watch them—or is it simple amusement?—they interrupt their own song to introduce the most varied melodies. If a sheep bleats, the bird immediately replies to the bleating; the clucking of a turkey, the cackling of a goose, the cry of the toucan are noted and faithfully reproduced. Then the Cassique returns to his own special refrain, to abandon it anew ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed with such romantic glamour?—fat burghers, clucking comfortably under the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... took to the water as soon as they saw it, as all little ducks will. The old hen was almost crazy at such behavior on the part of her chicks, and flew down to the water's edge, clucking and calling at a great rate. However,—to her great surprise, probably,—they all came safely to land. Every day after that, when the little ducks went for a swim, their hen-mother walked nervously back ...
— The Nursery, March 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... smoke-blackened rafters, while the shadows shortened and lengthened in the bright sunlit yard, the monotonous silence broken only by the deep regular snores of my companion, whose capacity for sleep was something marvellous, the clucking of poultry, and the occasional stamp or snort of a horse in the stable below. Now and again a rat would crawl out, and, emboldened by the stillness, creep close up to me, darting back into its hole with a jump and a squeal as I waved it off with hand or foot. My visitors from ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... only ejaculate the words, 'Pity!' 'Forgive!' in his most contemptuous tone; while Mrs. Shelldrake, rocking violently in her chair, gave utterance to the peculiar clucking 'ts, ts, ts, ts,' whereby certain women express emotions ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... of a country village in Ireland, which is never broken but by the squeal of a pig, or the clucking of chickens, or a high voice, heard occasionally in anger, was rudely shocked on the following Thursday evening. The unusual commotion commenced with a stampede of sans-culottish boys, and red-legged, wild-eyed girls, who burst into the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan |
