"Cuckoo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little story. It will be read with delight by every child into whose hands it is placed.... The author deserves all the praise that has been, is, and will be bestowed on 'The Cuckoo Clock.' Children's stories are plentiful, but one like this is not to be met with every ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... I think the mischief it does in this respect can hardly be over estimated. Nearly all birds look upon it as their enemy, and attack and annoy it when it appears near their breeding haunts. Thus, I have seen the pewee, the cuckoo, the robin, and the wood-thrush pursuing it with angry voice and gestures. A friend of mine saw a pair of robins attack one in the top of a tall tree so vigorously that they caused it to lose its hold, when it fell to the ground, and was so stunned by ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... could be more awful: it had been depopulated by the plague—all was silent, and the streets were matted with thick grass. In passing through an open space, which reminded me of a market-place, I heard the cuckoo with an indescribable sensation of pleasure mingled with solemnity. The sudden presence of a raven at a bridal banquet could scarcely have been ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... both. What, are you beginning to remember now—is it coming back to you after a whole month? I am going to quicken your memory up presently, I can tell you; I have got a good deal to pay off, I'm thinking. I know what you are at; you want to play cuckoo, to turn 'Cousin Philip' out that 'Cousin George' may fill the nest. You know the old man's soft points, and you keep working him up against me. You think that you would like the old place when he's gone—ay, and I daresay ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... the Cuckoo in Hampshire. (The next morning the papers announced that the Cuckoo had been heard in Devonshire—possibly a different one, but in no way superior to ours except in the matter of its Press agent.) Well, everybody in the house said, "Did you hear the Cuckoo?" to everybody else, until ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes, giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... he sang it for her. And others he sang, too—"The Merry Cuckoo" and "The Bailiff's Daughter". The last she liked so well that he sang it three times over, and they quite forgot ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... she had been together; winter fireside sketches; a glowing landscape of a hot summer afternoon passed with him in the bosom of Nunnely Wood; divine vignettes of mild spring or mellow autumn moments, when she had sat at his side in Hollow's Copse, listening to the call of the May cuckoo, or sharing the September treasure of nuts and ripe blackberries—a wild dessert which it was her morning's pleasure to collect in a little basket, and cover with green leaves and fresh blossoms, and her afternoon's delight to administer to Moore, berry by berry, and ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... to when we saw it last, but it was a mild balmy winter, with primroses and cuckoo-pints pushing in the valleys, and here and there a celandine ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... Leicestershire, where he had engaged himself as an usher to the school of which Mr. Crompton was master. Here he described to his old school-fellow, Hector, the dull sameness of his life, in the words of the poet: Vitam continct una dies: that it was as unvaried as the note of the cuckoo, and that he did not know whether it were more disagreeable for him to teach, or for the boys to learn the grammar rules. To add to his misery, he had to endure the petty despotism of Sir Wolstan Dixie, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... not try to discover beauties in nature? One can be so happy in a wood! What a charming thing to hear a leaf sing! I know few things more delightful than to watch the triumph of the month of May when the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the lark open the spring in our forests! And then, later, come those beautiful crystal days of autumn—days that are neither warm, nor yet are they really cold! And then the trees—how eloquent they can be made; with a little teaching they may be made ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the distant sky; The cloudy heavens, unblest by summer's smile; The sounding storm that sweeps the rugged isle, The chill, bleak summit of eternal snow, The wide, wild glen, the pathless plains below, The dark blue rocks, in barren grandeur piled, The cuckoo sighing to the pensive wild! Far different these from all that charm'd before, The grassy banks of Clutha's winding shore: The sloping vales, with waving forests lined; Her smooth blue lakes, unruffled by the wind. Hail, happy Clutha! glad shall I survey ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the first time, I heard the note of the cuckoo. "Cuck-oo—cuck-oo" it says, repeating the word twice, not in a brilliant metallic tone, but low and flute-like, without the excessive sweetness of the flute,—without an excess of saccharine juice in the sound. There are said to be always two cuckoos seen together. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... such harmlessness that he had not been annoyed by being taken out for exercise as regularly as he might have been. He had champed his oats and listened to the repartee of the stable-boys, and he had, perhaps, felt the coming of the spring when the cuckoo insisted upon it with thrilling mellowness across the green sweeps of the park land. Sometimes it made him sentimental, as it made his master, sometimes it made him stamp his small hoofs restlessly in his straw and want ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... full song, and sought to taunt me with his happier lot. Oh, how I envied him! No lessons, no task, no school; nothing but holiday, frolic, green fields, and fine weather. Had I been then more versed in poetry, I might have addressed him in the words of Logan to the cuckoo: ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... August of '99, or it may have been in the early days of September; but I remember that we heard the cuckoo in Patcham Wood, and that Jim said that perhaps it was the last of him. I was still at school, but Jim had left, he being nigh sixteen and I thirteen. It was my Saturday half-holiday, and we spent it, as we often did, out upon the Downs. Our ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in early June, When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er, Before the roses and the longest day— When garden walks and all the grassy floor With blossoms red and white of fallen May And chestnut flowers are strewn— So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, From the wet field, through the vext garden trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: "The bloom is gone, and with the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... is of the greatest importance.—Endeavour early to distinguish each several tone and key. Find out the exact notes sounded by the bell, the glass, the cuckoo, etc. ...
— Advice to Young Musicians. Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln • Robert Schumann
... was no longer a ruin; the buildings on the hill faded into the trees; the clothes of wanderers by the riverside took on mediaeval brightnesses, lost modern forms; and into the foreground ran three bare-headed, yellow-haired children, and in their brown arms great bunches of cuckoo-flowers. So might one returning from the Martyr's chapel have seen the path to the ferry in the days when the Clerk told ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... been fixed for five o'clock, and Julian intended, of course, to be in Victoria Street with Valentine to receive the expected guest, but Cuckoo Bright threw his polite plans out of gear, and Valentine was alone when, at half-past four, the electric bell rang, and, a moment later, Wade solemnly showed into the drawing-room a striking vision, such as had never "burst into that silent ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... thou, O scroll," he said, apostrophizing the letter, which lay on the table before his master, "dost speak with the tongue of the stranger? Hath not the cuckoo a harsh note, and yet she tells us of green buds and springing flowers? What if thy language be that of the stoled priest, is it not the same which binds hearts and hands together at the altar? And what though thou delayest to render ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... day Buster Bumblebee arrived at Farmer Green's place just as the cuckoo clock in the kitchen was striking nine. And he knew at once that Jimmy Rabbit must have told him the truth about the raising bee, for the farmyard was crowded with wagons and carryalls and buggies and gigs. There were people everywhere—so many that Buster ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... one of his works is more suggestive than Rosmersholm, there is not one which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... her own mind just where in my new room each bit of my beloved furniture shall be located—the mahogany chest of drawers, the old secretary, the four-post bedstead, the haircloth trunk, the oak book-case, the corn-husk rocker, the cuckoo clock, the Dutch cabinet—yes, each blessed piece has already had its place assigned to it, even to the old red cricket which Miss Anna Rice sent me from her Connecticut home twelve years ago. I am indeed the most fortunate ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... Blackbird Bluebird Bobolink Bullfinch Cock Canary Crow Cuckoo Eagle Falcon Goose Hawk Humming-bird Lark Mocking-bird Nightingale Owl Robin Summer Swallow ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... June, we were allowed to go down to our river, and we used to sit for hours among the flags which grew beside it, hidden by the tall reeds and the yellow flowers, making little green boats out of the broad leaves of the flags, while the sound of "Cuckoo, cuckoo" came from the orchard ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... duet of little cuckoo clocks, both in unison, both in time, both with that fascinating touch of the nasal Parisienne voice. Sally was ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... displeasure from them. When the messengers arrived at Gotham, they found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn, to shade the wood from the sun; and others were engaged in hedging a cuckoo, which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all employed upon some foolish way or other, which convinced the king's servants that it ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... does not adorn, but making no very particular impression. Bishop Percy is less celebrated for the ballads which he wrote than for those which he collected. Logan is remembered only by his verses on 'The Cuckoo.' To the reverend brothers Warton we owe respectively 'The Pleasure of Melancholy' and some lines 'To Fancy'; while of Thomas Blacklock, alas! the most remarkable feature was his blindness. One would like to have forgotten Robert Montgomery, of Satanic fame, but Macaulay will not let us do so. Blanco ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... his hands, "you are my daughter's affianced, are you not, and will give her high place and many famous titles, and her son shall be called Clavering, that the old name may not die but be great in England, in France, and in Italy. You must bide to marry her, lest that cuckoo, Hugh de Cressi, that cuckoo with the sharp bill, should creep into my nest. I'll not be worsted by a stripling clad in merchant's cloth who slew my only son. Take not my words ill, noble Noyon, for I am overdone with grief for the past and ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... scarcely possible that the tree can yield so much. A similar but much smaller homopterous insect, of the family 'Cercopidae', is known in England as the frog-hopper ('Aphrophora spumaria'), when full grown and furnished with wings, but while still in the pupa state it is called "Cuckoo-spit", from the mass of froth in which it envelops itself. The circulation of sap in plants in our climate, especially of the graminaceae, is not quick enough to yield much moisture. The African species is ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... clusters of grey-green flower buds already foretelling the crimson to come; about his feet a silver army of uncurling fronds brightened the earth and softened the sharp edges of the boulders scattered down the coomb. Here the lover waited to the music of a cuckoo, and his eyes ever turned towards a stile at the edge of the pine woods, two hundred yards distant ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... cuckoos, and I didn't see why Jane shouldn't brisk out at the seventh "oo" by mistake one day. However, Jane is in Celia's department, and if Celia was satisfied I was. Besides, the only other place for Muriel was the bathroom; and there is something about a cuckoo-clock in a bathroom which—well, one wants to be educated ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... looks up to him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance: the cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early youth not to be expressed: a linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight: an old withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections: a grey cloak, seen on ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... with a pretty cawarring. You've spun a yarn as long as all the posts and rails round my seven acres, and I dunna see as you've yet hedged in so much as th' owd wise men o' Gotham did, and that's a cuckoo. I've heard just one sensible word, and that was to recommend a cast-iron pulpit, in preference to a wooden 'un. As to a church-rate to repair th' owd steeple-house, why, my advice is to pull th' owd thing down, stick and ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... coast that hostile fleet, By nations dreaded and by NELSON beat; And here shall soon another triumph come, A deed of glory in a deed of gloom; Distressing glory! grievous boon of fate! The proudest conquest at the dearest rate. On shelf of deal beside the cuckoo-clock, Of cottage reading rests the chosen stock; Learning we lack, not books, but have a kind For all our wants, a meat for every mind. The tale for wonder and the joke for whim, The half-sung sermon and the half-groan'd ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... in poetry was "awakening the mind's attention . . . by directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us." His best poetry is about things out of doors and their influence on people's minds. You may like to read "Fidelity," "To the Cuckoo," "The Solitary Reaper," "The Reverie of Poor Susan," and others ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... thanked and blessed them and took the loaf to Christ. And for their charity the Lord set these good women in the sky as the Seven Stars,—you may see them to this day shining in love upon the sleeping world. But the wicked Baker he changed into a Cuckoo; and as long as he sings his dreary song, "Coo-coo! Coo-coo!" in the spring, so long the Seven Stars are visible in the heaven, so ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... bespangles the landscape with flowers, While the thrush and the cuckoo sing soft from the bowers, Through the wood-shaded windings with Bella I 'll rove, And feast unrestrained on the smiles of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the expectations excited by the robin and the song sparrow are fully justified. The thrushes have all come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink azalea, to listen. With me the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager delay their coming till then. In the meadows the bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the field sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; and the woods are unfolding ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... were not that these forfeitures, and that last fine that the old driveller Turntippet is gaping for, and which, I dare say, is laid on by this time, have fairly driven me out of house and home, I were a coxcomb and a cuckoo to boot to trust your fair promises of getting me a commission in the Irish brigade. What have I to do with the Irish brigade? I am a plain Scotchman, as my father was before me; and my grand-aunt, Lady ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... with some errand of its own— And does not say: I am alone. He sees the gentle stir of birth When morning purifies the earth; He leans upon a gate and sees The pastures, and the quiet trees. Low, woody hill, with gracious bound, Folds the still valley almost round; The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn, Is answer'd from the depth of dawn; In the hedge straggling to the stream, Pale, dew-drench'd, half-shut roses gleam; But, where the farther side slopes down, He sees the drowsy new-waked clown In his white quaint-embroider'd ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Moore's Melodies on lower keys, and at much lower prices, would probably restore the sentimental music of Ireland to its natural supremacy. There are in Bunting but two good sets of words—"The Bonny Cuckoo," and poor Campbell's "Exile's of Erin." These and a few of Lover's and Mahony's songs can alone compete with Moore. But, save one or two by Lysaght and Drennan, almost all the Irish political songs are too desponding or weak to content a people marching to independence as proudly ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... our music than musicians may be willing to allow; but it is no more than justice to a despised bird to say, that from it we have derived the minor scale, whose origin has puzzled so many; the cuckoo's couplet being the minor third sung ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... over the grass, and the bees kicked up their yellow legs as they tilted into them. The garlic stuck up stout spikes into the air, and the young radishes were green and lusty. The brown bird in the tree sang, "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" and Peter trudged contentedly along, kicking up little clouds of dust at every footstep, whistling merrily and staring up into the bright sky, where the white clouds hung like little sheep, feeding on the wide blue field. ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... voices during the night. The whip-poor-will was piping when I lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up after midnight. I heard the song sparrow and the kingbird also, like watchers calling the hour, and several times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am convinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird, and that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His peculiar guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard almost ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... remember your oaks and your beeches. I remember the cuckoo's reply To the ring dove that moaned where the reaches Of the Windrush ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... round of her childish pursuits. Every morning she goes demurely to school to fix her thoughts on "button holes and spelling books." Perhaps it is a dame school like that in "Water Babies," with a "shining clean stone floor and curious old prints on the wall and a cuckoo clock in the corner," Here some dozen children sit on benches "gabbling Chris-cross," while a nice old woman in a red petticoat and white cap hears them from the ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... innumerable friends the Trawlers are always offering. In fact, I think Newson looks to Lowestoft as a Summer Pasture, and is in no hurry to leave it. He lives here well for nothing, except Bread, Cheese, and Tea and Sugar. He has now taken to Cocoa, however, which he calls 'Cuckoo' to my hearing; having become enamoured of that Beverage in the Lugger, where it is the order of the day. . ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... and fields rival gardens even in the richness of colour. We have all seen meadows white with Narcissus, glowing with Buttercups, Cowslips, early purple Orchis, or Cuckoo Flowers; cornfields blazing with Poppies; woods carpeted with Bluebells, Anemones, Primroses, and Forget-me-nots; commons with the yellow Lady's Bedstraw, Harebells, and the sweet Thyme; marshy places with the yellow stars of the Bog Asphodel, the Sun-dew sparkling ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... cuckoo! sweet voice of Spring, Without you sad the year had been, The vocal heavens your welcome ring, The hedge-rows ope and take you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... you hear the chip-squirrels chirrup, and the red squirrels mock; then the hen-hawks chatter and shriek in the air, and the crows caw and clamor; the thrushes and swamp robins bandy their boasts in challenges of music; the blue jay gossips, and the cuckoo cries. ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... pleasant, honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Goneril herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick, such as comparing the king to the hedgesparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains; and saying that an ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that Lear's daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father); ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... already a sweetheart," said he; "then the corn which is within it will be turned to flour; but if thou art still only a young cuckoo, then ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... wife to help him,' she went on. 'I know, because I went to the shop Friday morning on pretence of asking for a cuckoo-clock.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... might indeed wonder! To have deliberately planned a Continental war with Germany, and Germany's 8,000,000 of soldiers, without men, guns, or ammunition beyond the requirements of an Expeditionary Force of 160,000 men, might have well become the State of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. But the England of Raleigh, Chatham, Pitt, and Wellington has not generally been reckoned a ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... itself, not less perilous. It might be said: "The cuckoo lays her egg on the grass, no matter where; she lifts it in her beak and places it in the nearest appropriate nest." Might not the Balaninus follow an analogous method? Does she employ the rostrum to place the egg in its position at the base of the acorn? ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... songs, which, though not as numerous then as in some later periods, show that the great tradition of English secular lyric poetry reaches back from our own time to that of the Anglo-Saxons without a break. The best known of all is the 'Cuckoo Song,' of the thirteenth century, intended to be sung in harmony ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... So it was that, after listening to the gentle discourse of the ladies, who tried to wheedle and to fondle him to obtain a favour from him, the good Touranian would return to his home, dreamy as a poet, wretched as a restless cuckoo, and would say to himself, "I must take to myself a wife. She would keep the house tidy, keep the plates hot for me, fold the clothes for me, sew my buttons on, sing merrily about the house, tease me to ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... spoken words was taken by human beings when they imitated the calls or other sounds produced by living things, and tacitly agreed to recognize the imitation as a symbol of the creature making it. Thus the names for the cuckoo and the crow in many languages besides our own are simply copies of the calls uttered by these birds; a Tahitian calls a cat mimi; the name for a snake almost invariably includes the hissing attributed ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... about it, and suggested that he should write for an American magazine an article on "The Dulness of Paris." He went on: "If you could only run over here to roam about our Kentish hills, you would soon be all right again. They are covered with millions of wood anemones, violets, primroses, cuckoo flowers, and blue-bells; and the low ground is gay with marsh-marigolds." Alas! the Bois offered all this in profusion, but for flowers Gilbert never really cared; he merely appreciated their valeur in the harmony of a landscape. He ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... dried. Some of the deepest holes had a few pine branches laid in them, but that was the only road-mending that ever was done. Overhead were the tall firs and silver birches with their little pale round leaves; and somewhere, not far away, a cuckoo was calling, while the murmur of the wild pigeons never stopped for ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... species of retiring-room at one end of the hut, wherein the modest members of the mess might bathe and splash at ease. The remainder of the servants went out armed and returned with (1) a zinc bath, (2) a stove, (3) a cuckoo clock, (4) a large mirror, (5) a warming-pan. "Once let us make a home for ourselves," we said, "and our energies will be free to finish the War." We devoted every cunning worker in the battery to this great end. Drill ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... silver mist; on the other the mountains, so ethereal that they looked as though at any moment they might melt away into the blue of the sky. But Mick had no heart for these things. Even when he heard the cuckoo across the fields, for the first time that year, it was with no answering thrill, but only with a dull sense that he had grown too old now to care—seeing Aunt Mary had brought back all the trouble he had tried so ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... while in our meadows we purposely propagate tender fodder plants, like grasses and clovers, we find on the margins of our pastures and by our roadsides only protected species; such as thistles, houndstongue, cuckoo-pint, charlock, nettles (once more), and thorn bushes. The cattle or the rabbits eat down at once all juicy and succulent plants, leaving only these nauseous or prickly kinds, together with such stringy and innutritious weeds as chervil, plantain, and burdock. Here we ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king; Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... cold cynicism on our unwillingness to leave her again at the mercy of the Germans, and had no more consideration of our rights or feelings than the cuckoo has for the owner of the nest in ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words. Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled by laughing listeners. The most innocent echo has an impish ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... centuries before us. What ceremonious processions may have moved over this ancient causeway! From the branch of a maple that sent its roots into the more defined grade came the dreamy notes of a mourning dove, from a walnut tree a cuckoo uttered his queer song that perhaps was the same as these strange people listened to; indigo buntings sent their high pitched breezy song from the tops of the trees, while the warbling vireo seemed to be saying, "who were they?" and the clear, melodious call of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... were married in the spring, when the forest glades were yellow with primroses, the mossy banks blue with violets, and the cuckoo was heard with monotonous iteration from sunrise to sundown. They were married in the little village church at Beechdale, and Mrs. Scobel declared that Miss Tempest's wedding was the prettiest that ever had been solemnised in that small Gothic temple. Never, perhaps, even at Eastertide, ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... which usually remained the head clerk, then an empty room, which, for the sake of secrecy, separated the notary's sanctum from the other offices, such was this laboratory of all kinds and sorts. Two o'clock had just struck by an old cuckoo clock, placed between the two windows of the office; agitation seemed to reign among the clerks, which some fragments of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... adjudged a bore, and one sighs for Regent Street and the "Rag and Famish," flaxen ringlets, and roast beeL A twelvemonth might pass pleasantly on the Rock; but after that the "damnable iteration" of existence must jar on the nerves like the note of a cuckoo. Still, as my philosopher of the cemetery remarked, there are worse places—far worse, Assouan and Aden, for example; so let not the gallant gentleman repine whom Fate has assigned to a round of duty in Sutlersville. For Tommy Atkins of the rank and file, it is wearisome when he is young; ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... summer long I never want a song, From my birds in the old beech-trees; I have singers all the night, And, with the morning bright, Come my busy humming fat brown bees. When I've nothing else to do, With the nursing birds I sit, And we laugh at the cuckoo A-cuckooing to her tit! Ha, ha, ha! ha, ha, ha! ...
— The Gold Thread - A Story for the Young • Norman MacLeod
... I said, "Troopers must forage where the grain is grown: I share my kopecks with the village priest, Who winnows peccadillos by the sheaf." Then Zanthon, laughing in his foxy beard: "When Amine meets me in the plane-tree walk (Where pairing little finches seek to build, We saw the cuckoo thieve their nests when boys), Shall I then tell her, in my peasant way, Your broken promise, and her troth denied?" And he was gone—gone, with the stud he bought From Schamyl's son, up by Caucasus way, Leaving me solitude to reason with. Around me, then, an odor swept—the ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo buds of yellow hue Do paint ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ere they repair last year's villages, and join excitedly in the chorus; while the great osprey wheels overhead, and the grey falcon sits on a bare branch, still as a sentinel, each waiting for an opportunity to take toll of the nutmeg pigeons. The channel-billed cuckoo shrieks her discordant warning of the approaching wet season; and the scrub fowl utters those far-off imitations of the exclamation of civilised hens. Sundown at Kumboola towards the end of September, when the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... angle heightened the general effect of arrogant self-esteem. He was an illustration of the ancient mystery—how is it that a man with such a face, and such insolence written all over him, can become a leader of other men and persuade them to hatch the eggs of treachery that he lays like a cuckoo in their nests? ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... a rock. "Corcorico!" chanted the Cock. The Monkey was scratching himself and admiring his grinning phiz in the water, which served him for a looking-glass. Then the Buzzard was beside himself [with rage]. And the Cuckoo was wailing. The Ass rolled over and over, crying: "Heehaw! how ugly Man is!" The Elephant stamped about with his heavy feet, his trumpet raised towards the heavens. The Bear assumed dignified airs, while the Peacock was showing off his wheel-like tail. And in the distance the Lion was majestically ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... so be Sir William comes home again, he'll find his wife has got a cuckoo in her nest." Here he burst from the stranger with a malicious shout, and descending a by-path, was soon lost amidst the intricacies of a deep wood, skirting the verge of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... innumerable similar examples which, with a large number of habitual superstitious presuppositions, make only false causality. Pearls mean tears because they have similar form; inasmuch as the cuckoo may not without a purpose have only two calls at one time and ten or twenty at another, the calls must mean the number of years before death, before marriage, or of a certain amount of money, or any other countable thing. Such notions are so firmly rooted in the peasantry and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... ticks loudly, shows the hours, minutes, and seconds, strikes, cries "cuckoo!" and perhaps shows the phases of the moon. When the clock is wound up, all the phenomena which it exhibits are potentially contained in its mechanism, and a clever clockmaker could predict all it will do after an examination ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... "It's a cuckoo's, sir. I know all about it, except where he was born, and who were his parents, and how he got his money. And Hareton Earnshaw has been cast out like ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... philosophical Ranke, "not to pray, but to contemplate the Belvidere Apollo. They disgraced the most solemn festivals by open profanations. The clergy, in their services, sought the means of exciting laughter. One would mock the cuckoo, and another recite indecent stories about St. Peter." Luther, when he visited Italy, was extremely shocked at the infidel spirit which prevailed among the clergy, who were hostile to the circulation of the Scriptures, and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... a fairy-elf changeling. My faith, they do not never have seen ein wechsel-balg; for I saw one myself at Cologne, and it was twice as big as yonder girl, and did break the poor people, with eating them up, like de great big cuckoo in the sparrow's nest; but this Venella eat no more than other girls—it was no wechsel-balg in ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... in so smart and fluent a manner, the Praenestine [king] directs some witticisms squeezed from the vineyard, himself a hardy vine-dresser, never defeated, to whom the passenger had often been obliged to yield, bawling cuckoo with roaring voice. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... bitter memories. I cried afresh to think I should never go again to the corner where I always found the earliest violets; and then I cried to think that the nightingale would soon be back, and how that very morning, when I opened my window, I had heard the cuckoo, and could tell that he was calling from just about ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... orchards and hedges had shrunk to a casual evensong from a few yet unwearied performers; the robin was beginning to assert himself once more; and there was a feeling in the air of change and departure. The cuckoo, of course, had long been silent; but many another feathered friend, for months a part of the familiar landscape and its small society, was missing too, and it seemed that the ranks thinned steadily day by day. Rat, ever observant of all winged movement, saw that it was taking ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... second milk and soda, to consider my hideous plight, when a genial fool upon the opposite side of the table asked me if I had 'witnessed the comedy at Victoria.' Icily I inquired: 'What comedy?' He explained offensively that 'some cuckoo had tried the old wheeze of stuffing pepper in his trunk to put off the Customs,' and that the intended deterrent had untimely emerged. My brothers, conceive my exhilaration. 'The old wheeze.' I could have broken the ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... empty churn; when the stiff backed man has hammered or sawed till his arms are broken, or till his employers are tired; when the gilt lamb has ba-ad, the obstinate pig squeaked, and the provoking cuckoo cried cuckoo, till no one in the house can endure the noise; what remains to be done?—Wo betide the unlucky little philosopher, who should think of inquiring why the woman churned, or how the bird ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... to year in loneliness of soul; And this deep mountain valley was to him Soundless with all its streams. The bird of dawn Did never rouse this Cottager from sleep With startling summons; not for his delight The vernal cuckoo shouted, not for him Murmured the labouring bee. When stormy winds Were working the broad bosom of the Lake Into a thousand thousand sparkling waves, Rocking the trees, or driving cloud on cloud Along the sharp ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... exactly, Jasper; the cuckoo is a pleasant, funny bird, and its presence and voice give a great charm to the green trees and fields; no, I can't say I wish exactly to ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... into which they passed; a room whose scheme of colour was that watery green which we associate with the scenery of early spring, the call of the cuckoo, and the river echoes where the weir foams ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... due, Pluck me next an old Cuckoo; Emblem of the happy fates Of easy, kind, cornuted mates. Pluck him well—be sure you do— Who wouldn't be an old Cuckoo, Thus to have his plumage blest, Beaming ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... have suggested various names, and among some of the best-known ones may be mentioned the goose-foot, goose-grass, goose-tongue. Shakespeare speaks of cuckoo-buds, and there is cuckoo's-head, cuckoo-flower, and cuckoo-fruit, besides the stork's-bill and crane's-bill. Bees are not without their contingent of names; a popular name of the Delphinium grandiflorum being the bee-larkspur, "from the resemblance ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of the Eighteenth Century made many of those jolly little wall clocks called Wag-on-the-Wall. These clocks may be still picked up in out-of-the-way towns. In construction they are very much like the old cuckoo clock which has come to us from Switzerland, and the tile clock which comes from Holland. These clocks with long, exposed weights and pendulum, have not the dignity of the French wall clocks, which were as complete in themselves as fine ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... April as it usually appears in England. The blackthorn sometimes blooms in Britain in February, but the swallow does not appear till about the 20th of April, nor the anemone bloom ordinarily till that date. The nightingale comes about the same time, and the cuckoo follows close. Our cuckoo does not come till near June; but the water-thrush, which Audubon thought nearly equal to the nightingale as a songster (though it certainly is not), I have known to come by the 21st. I have seen the sweet English violet, escaped from the garden, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... "blessed bird" and "sweet messenger of spring," the "cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities of ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... mistakes; and that no instinct has been produced for the exclusive good of other animals, but that each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others. It is to him "far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves, the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... and plump arms were set off by a brown dress, which he stared down on when he did not look into her pale face. She felt each movement of his eyes. She had come from the other room, and from thoughts of death; she heard a little cuckoo clock upstairs announce that it was seven o'clock, and the little thing reminded her of all that was now past. One thing with another made her turn from him with tears in her eyes as she said, "I cannot possibly think of such ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... in the one, gas in the other; but if there were anything more poetic in horse or balloon, Wordsworth did not discover it. There is something also in a cuckoo ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long |
