"Cuckoo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of this accidental experiment set me on trying my skill in the mechanical arts. Accordingly I took down and cleaned my landlady's cuckoo-clock, and in so doing, silenced that companion of the spring for ever and a day. I mounted a turning-lathe, and in attempting to use it, I very nearly cribbed off, with an inch-and-half former, one of the fingers which the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... of treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been beguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo—of this we are confident—where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... sparrow surrounds her nest with thorns as a defence against apes and serpents. The eggs of the cuckoo, as regards size, colour, and marking, invariably resemble those of the birds in whose nests she lays. Sylvia ruja, for example, lays a white egg with violet spots; Sylvia hippolais, a red one with black spots; Regulus ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... old doctrine of immutability of specific forms will surely but slowly die away. It is a shame to give you trouble, but I should be very much obliged if you could tell me where differently coloured eggs in individuals of the cuckoo have been described, and their laying in twenty- seven kinds of nests. Also do you know from your own observation that the limbs of sheep imported into the West Indies change colour? I have had detailed information about the loss of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "your voice does not ring the cuckoo chime of compliment, but speaks like that of one who knows to what he pledges himself. If—but it is impossible—but yet, if an opportunity should occur, I will ask you if you remember this promise; and I assure you, I shall not be angry ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... these—'The Manciple's Tale'—has never been printed. Of the three poems which were published, the first—'The Prioress' Tale'—was included in the edition of 1820. The 'Troilus and Cressida' and 'The Cuckoo and the Nightingale' were included in the "Poems of Early and Late Years" (1842); but they had been published the year before, in a small volume entitled 'The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernised' (London, 1841), a volume to which Elizabeth ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... been at work, where the bluebells were trampled down, and a trunk had swayed and staggered down from its gashed stump. Climbing it with them, over, and on to the very edge of the copse, whence there stretched an undiscovered country, from far away in which came the sounds, 'Cuckoo-cuckoo!' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with wet, and the woods were dim with the smoke of rain, and the paths were red with the fallen bloom of the red chestnuts and white with the flourish of May and brown with the catkins of the oak, and the cuckoo, calling in Mosses Wood, was answered from Redlands and the Warren, and the pines where we sat (snug and dry) looked so solemn and dark that, with a little fancy, it was easy to change the living greenwood into the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... bluebells they could see in the distance, or to the tall fir-trees where they could listen to the wood-pigeons cooing overhead, or "just a little further," on the chance of catching a glimpse of the cuckoo they had heard calling all the afternoon—until old Marie had sat down on the stump of a tree, fanning herself with a handkerchief, and declaring that ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... immense beard, that would have been white if he hadn't been a charcoal-burner, kissed Barty on both cheeks, and gave him a huge bag full of some kind of forest berry that is good to eat; also a young cuckoo (which Barty restored to liberty an hour later); also a dormouse and a large green lizard; also, in a little pasteboard box, a gigantic pale green caterpillar four inches long and thicker than your thumb, with a row of shiny blue stars in relief all along each side of its ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... 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 ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... enjoy happiness. If unsuccessful, one loses esteem. Therefore in accomplishing the acts of such persons, one should, without doing them completely, always keep something unfinished. A king should do what is for his good, imitating a cuckoo, a boar, the mountains of Meru, an empty chamber, an actor, and a devoted friend.[421] The king should frequently, with heedful application, repair to the houses of his foes, and even if calamities befall them, ask them about their good. They that are idle never win affluence; nor they that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... there was but one Madame Warens in the world, whose image was never absent from his thoughts; with whom flowers and verdure sprung up beneath his feet, and without whom all was cold and barren in nature and in his own breast. The cuckoo, "that wandering voice," that comes and goes with the spring, mocks our ears with one note from youth to age; and the lapwing, screaming round the traveller's path, repeats for ever the same sad ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... 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 nation ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... earth a rivulet break And purl along the untrodden wilderness; There the shy cuckoo comes his thirst to slake, There the shrill jay alights his plumes to dress; And there the stealthy fox, when morn is gray, Laps the clear stream and lightly ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... the ongoings of the seasons in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as the spider ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... between, primroses clustering under the roots of the trees, daffodils gilding the grass above, and the banks verdant with exquisite feather-moss. Such a springtide wood was joy to all, especially as the first cuckoo of the season came to add to their delights and set them counting for the augury of happy years, which proved so many that Mysie said they would not know ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the frank, outspoken 'Good nights.' When all the signs of ripeness are visible—the love-shades and love-notes that cannot be hidden, the unconscious caress of the eyes in a fleeting glance, the involuntary softening of voices, the cuckoo-sob in the throat—why, the night-parting kiss does not need to be seen. It has to be. Still further, oh my woman, know that I justify you ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... now plodding in the rear. She accosted him in the soft tones that had from the first so charmed him, contrasting with her sister's voice as the tones of a reed-pipe contrast with those from metal, or as the full voice of the cuckoo with the shrill chirp of the sparrow. The soft voice was very serious, the manner more than sedate, the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... always perfect, and are liable to make 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, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... parasitical habit of the cuckoo and hits on an explanation of it. He speculates why the partridges and deer in South ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... I remember well, of wonderful beauty. I had left them all three together in the water meadow, little thinking of what was in store for us before many hours. Thumbeline had been crowning Florrie with a wreath of flowers. She had gathered cuckoo-pint and marsh marigolds and woven them together, far more deftly than any of us could have done, into a chaplet. I remember the curious winding, wandering air she had been singing (without any words, as usual) over ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... undoubtedly derives from cuculus, cogul, cocu, a cuckoo, has taken a queer twist, nor can I explain how its present meaning arose from a shebird which lays her egg in a strange nest. Wittol, on the other hand, from Witan, to know, is rightly applied to one whom La Fontaine calls "cocu et content," ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... toughest of digestions would dare to include these prickly, strong-jawed, meatless insects in a bill of fare. Now and then I have found an ani, or black cuckoo, with a few in its stomach: but an ani can swallow a stinging-haired caterpillar and enjoy it. The most consistent feeder upon Attas is the giant marine toad. Two hundred Attas in a night is not an uncommon meal, the exact number being verifiable by a ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... cried. "A real old cuckoo clock like my mother had." She turned the clock over and over. "Just like my mother had, when Pete was still alive." ...
— Beyond the Door • Philip K. Dick
... among the Asiatics was Phrygia. Among the Thracians, Abdera; among the Greeks, Boeotia; in England it is Gotham. Of the Gothamites ironically called The Wise Men of Gotham, many ridiculous stories are traditionally told, particularly, that often having heard the cuckoo but never seen her, they hedged in a bush from whence her note seemed to proceed, so that being confined within so small a compass, they might at length satisfy their curiosity; and at a place called Court Hill, in this parish, is a bush called ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... he has more respect for a genuine bad man than for a sham good one. In fact, his 'Eternal Verities' come pretty much to the same as Darwin's 'Law of the advancement of all organic bodies'; 'let the strong live, and the weakest die.' He had no objection to seeing 'the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, or ants making slaves.' But he atones for all this by his hatred of cant and hypocrisy. It is for his manliness that we love him, for his honesty, for his indifference to any mortal's ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... peculiarities of the instructors rather than to the period when the instruction was given. The marks left on the memory by the instructions of a foster-mother are soon sponged clean away. Consider the history of the cuckoo, which is reared exclusively by foster-mothers. It is probable that nearly every young cuckoo, during a series of many hundred generations, has been brought up in a family whose language is a chirp and a twitter. But the cuckoo cannot or will not adopt that language, or any other ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... having any. He couldn't: he just couldn't. Since necessity did not force him to work for his bread and butter, he would not work for work's sake. You can't make the columbine flowers nod in January, nor make the cuckoo sing in England at Christmas. Why? It isn't his season. He doesn't want to. Nay, he ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... wechsel-balg—what you call 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
... the cuckoo comes to the bare thorn, Sell your cow and buy your corn; But when she comes to the full bit, Sell your corn ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... wonderful toys the ingenuity and mechanical skill of Europe had produced. As he grew older the toys became more complicated, being in the form of gramophones, graphophones, telephones, phonographs, electric lights, electric cars, cuckoo clocks, Swiss watches and indeed all the great inventions of modern times. The boy was t'ao ch'i, and the eunuchs say that if he were thwarted in any of his undertakings, or denied anything he very ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... 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 clock, or ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... his loose box and professed 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 to go out. He did not intend, when he was taken out, to emulate the Industrious ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and had gone with her nurse to take the first meadow ramble; she could not help bounding to pluck every daisy she saw; and when the violets came, and the primroses, she was out of her wits with joy. She had never even heard of Wordsworth; yet, as she listened to the first cuckoo note, she thought it no bird, but truly "a wandering voice." Of Shelley's glorious lyric ode she knew nothing; and yet she never heard the skylark's song without thinking it a spirit of the air, or one of the angels hymning ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... closely that they would assuredly have had recourse to clockwork in some one or two of their chapels; I cannot doubt, for example, that they would have eagerly welcomed the idea of making the cock crow to Peter by a cuckoo-clock arrangement, if it had been presented to them. This opens up the whole question of realism versus conventionalism in art—a subject much too large to ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... performance, called "The Yarrow Unvisited." ... After this we come to some ineffable compositions, which the poet has entitled, "Moods of my own Mind." ... We have then a rapturous mystical ode to the Cuckoo; in which the author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity ... after this there is an address to a butterfly.... We come next to a long story of a "Blind Highland Boy," who lived near an ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... brakes, covered with maples, alders, and hazels. The other spaces among the trees were enlivened by patches of yellow flowering and odorous gorse. Mixed with the warblings of innumerable feathered songsters were heard the cheering notes of the cuckoo; and the newly-arrived swallows were seen chasing the flies along the plain, or skimming over the surface of the river. Already had Richard's depression yielded to the exhilarating freshness of the morning, and the same kindly influence produced a more salutary effect ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to contain themselves? They'll turn the whole place upside-down for you. I know them. They'll pretend it's nothing, but mother won't sleep at night for thinking how to arrange things for the best, and as for my cuckoo of an uncle, if you notice something funny about your feet, it'll be the esteemed alderman licking your boots. You'll have the time of your life. In fact they'll ruin your character for you. There'll be no holding ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... away, as he had told me, till the evening. I felt as though I had been let out of prison as I breakfasted joyfully on the verandah, the sun streaming through the creeperless trellis on to the little meal, and the first cuckoo of the year calling to me from the fir wood. Of the dinner and evening before me I would not think; indeed I had a half-formed plan in my head of going to the forest after lunch with the babies, taking wraps and ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... and a "whirr-rr," the doors of the little carved clock on the wall new open and a cuckoo came out ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... brain when she in early childhood roamed those dark, solemn woods, or sat at night on the lowly cottage stile, gazing on the wild, grotesque shadows cast by the moonbeams from the huge, forest trees; or how she listened to the solemn hootings of the lonesome owl, the monotonous cuckoo, and sudden whippoorwill; or laughed at the glowworm's light in the dark swamps, and asked her aunty if they were not a group of stars come down to play ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... 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 ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... a time the men of Gotham would have kept the Cuckoo so that she might sing all the year, and in the midst of their town they made a hedge round in compass and they got a Cuckoo, and put her into it, and said, "Sing there all through the year, or thou shalt have neither ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... never weary of looking at the inscriptions on the great cliffs at the River of the Dog—the strange beauty of that name! It was like the place-names of native Ulster—Athbo, the Ford of Cows, Sraidcuacha, the Cuckoo's Lane—one name sounded to the other like tuning-forks. And the sweet strange harmony of it filled his heart, so that he could understand the irresistible charm of Lebanon—the high clear note like a bird's ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... fairy palaces with towers of silver and frosted pinnacles, so wonderful and beautiful that as she looked at it she forgot that there was work to be done, until the cuckoo clock on ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... unwittingly rears the cuckoo's spurious offspring, tending with care the ultimate destroyer of its own young, does so in perfect ignorance of the results about to follow the misplaced affection. The cravings of the interloper are satisfied to the detriment of its own offspring; and when the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... garden, only a stray shining Of daffodil flames amid April's cuckoo-flowers, Or a cluster of aconite mixt with weeds entwining! But, dark and lofty, a royal cedar towers By homely thorns: whether the white rain drifts Or sun scorches, he holds the downs in ken, The western vale; his branchy tiers he lifts, ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the furzes where Waldron's three fox terriers ran before the party; and now and then a brave buck coney would stand upon the nibbled knoll above his burrow and drum danger before he darted in. It was a haunt of the cuckoo and peewit, ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... pleasure in the day. Pain is an extinguisher that can put out the sun. She had ceased to find pleasure in the singing of the birds, the voice of the pigeon sounded to her no more than an unbeautiful falsetto growl. She was irritated by the fact that the cuckoo had only one song to sing. She tried not to hoe in time to that song, but the monotony of it possessed her. Her row of beans stretched in front of her right across the world; every time she looked along it the end seemed farther ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... forests are in flower and fair are the hamlets; The woods are in bloom, the world is astir: 50 Everything urges one eager to travel, Sends the seeker of seas afar To try his fortune on the terrible foam. The cuckoo warns in its woeful call; The summer-ward sings, sorrow foretelling, 55 Heavy to the heart. Hard is it to know For the man of pleasure, what many with patience Endure who dare the dangers of exile! In my bursting ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... drink in the rays of the sun. In every tree in the garden a thrush woke up and began to sing; sparrows chirped, jays screamed, blue-tits chattered, and the chiff-chaff uttered his strange note. In the woods a cuckoo called and blackbird fluted to blackbird in the hedge. In the stables the horses awoke and champed at their stalls; the cat jumped down and ran after a mouse which crept out from under the straw. The sentry at the courtyard ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans
... to the 1815 edition, has the following note on ll. 3, 4 of the poem:—"This concise interrogation characterises the seeming ubiquity of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of corporeal existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power, by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... out the blazing root they heard: "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" as plain as ever the spring-bird's voice came over the moor on ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... The cinnamon-backed cuckoo must be a graceful minstrel in our green hedges in July, though I am ashamed to admit I never was lucky enough to meet him. The oriole, blue jay, officer-bird, summer red-bird, indigo-bird and golden-winged woodpecker ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... home, occupied with literature and art, perfecting their dainty cities; while their tougher neighbors are dominating the globe, imposing their language and customs on the conquered peoples or the earth. One feels this on the Riviera. It reminds you of the cuckoo who, once installed in a robin's nest, that seems to him convenient and warmly located in the sunshine, ends by kicking ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... procures from the nests of wild bees, common throughout the whole of Africa. The account given of the mode in which it finds these nests would be incredible, were it not that we have the testimony of reverend missionaries to confirm it. It is as follows:—In Africa there is a bird—a species of cuckoo—known as the Indicator bird, or honey guide. This little creature hops from tree to tree, itself apparently in search of the bees' nests. While doing so, it utters a shrill cry; and these cries are repeated until the honey hive is found. The ratel lies in wait for this bird; and, on hearing ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume, The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!) And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world's a blaze of sky The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... of June, and the cuckoo at this time of the summer scarcely ceased his cry for more than two or three hours during the night. The bird's note, so familiar to her ears from infancy, was now absolute torture to the poor girl. On the Friday following the Wednesday of Melbury's departure, and the day after the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... things are the same as none And nothing is that is under the sun. Seven's a dozen and never is then, Whether is what and what is when, A man is a tree and a cuckoo a cow For gold galore and silver enow To ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... repeated Phil. "Why, everything, my gentle cuckoo. Dost thou not yet know that Indians generally, and the Mayubuna in particular, have a very wholesome dread and horror of thunderstorms, believing, as they do, that the evil spirits come abroad and hold high revel upon such occasions? If an Indian happens to be struck by lightning, his fellow ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... that Emlyn could hear or see. She woke and slept, but was quite aware when Patience rose up after a brief doze, and found the first streaks of dawn in the sky, a cuckoo calling as if for very life in the nearest tree, and Steadfast quietly sweeping the dew from the grass in a little open space shut in by rocks, trees, and bushes, close to the ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... follow the plow in hopes of becoming the son-in-law of the farmer. The first condition that the cunning peasant set on each new servant was this: "I engage you," he would say, "for a year—that is, till the cuckoo sings the return of spring; but if, from now till then, you say once that you are not satisfied, I will cut off the end of your nose. I give you the same right over me," he added, laughing. And he did as he ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... you, any emphatic idee laid down by Peets instantly sets Boggs to strikin' same as one of them cuckoo clocks. ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... to a feast were invited by dozens, But, alas! they return'd not; and she had no taste [p 5] To appear in a costume of vine-leaves or paste. The WOODCOCK preferr'd his lone haunt on the moor; And the Traveller, SWALLOW, was still on his tour. While the CUCKOO, who should have been one of the guests Was rambling on visits to other ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... flew west, so I s'pose this will fly into the cuckoo's nest," said Rob, as he read ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... on into May, for the men were thrang with work, and the lassies at the big house haining a bit of bannock to be putting under their pillows for fear of hearing the cuckoo, when first I heard the strange whistling. It is not a very lucky thing to be hearing the cuckoo and you wanting food, and I think this is just a haver of the old folk to be making the young ones rise early on the fine clear mornings; but many's the ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... 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 ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... everything. On three sides descent was barred by sheer precipices; on the fourth a steep slope promised a practicable path, at least as far as my eye could reach. I placed the weaker and smaller of my birds in portable cages, and then commenced my experiment by taking out a strong-winged cuckoo and throwing him downwards over the precipice. He fell at first almost like a stone; but before he was quite lost to sight in the mist, I had the pleasure of seeing that he had spread his wings, and was able to sustain himself. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... story of the introduction of Christianity, we learn how the maiden Marjatta, "as pure as the dew is, as holy as stars are that live without stain," was feeding her flocks and listening to the singing of the golden cuckoo, when a berry fell into her bosom, and she conceived and bore a son, whereupon the people despised and rejected her. Moreover, no one would baptize the infant: "The god of the wilderness refused, and Wainamoinen would have had the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... name of this mill was Grotte. But the man to whom King Frode gave the mill was called Hengekjapt. King Frode had the maid-servants led to the mill, and requested them to grind for him gold and peace, and Frode's happiness. Then he gave them no longer time to rest or sleep than while the cuckoo was silent or while they sang a song. It is said that they sang the song called the Grottesong, and before they ended it they ground out a host against Frode; so that on the same night there came the sea-king, ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... take the trouble to row out into the harbour of Algeciras and scramble onto a little black boat headed across the straits. Hardly has the rock of Gibraltar turned to cloud when one's foot is on the soil of an almost unknown Africa. Tangier, indeed, is in the guide-books; but, cuckoo-like, it has had to lays its eggs in strange nests, and the traveller who wants to find out about it must acquire a work dealing with some other country—Spain or Portugal or Algeria. There is no guide-book to Morocco, and no way of knowing, once one has left Tangier behind, ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... 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
... as to whether the complaisant proprietor of so many charms desires to have a recheat winded in his forehead, and to hang his bugle in an invisible baldrick; whether it is true in his case that Love's ear will hear the lowest cuckoo note, and that Love's perception of gossip is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails. Towards all these points I have directed my researches. I have resolved myself into a Special Commission, and I have sat upon grass-widowers in camera. If I sit a little longer ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... "You're a most amazing cuckoo in many directions," said the Nilghai, still chuckling over the thought of the dinner. "Never mind. We had both been working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we spent, and as you're only a ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Grey, was one of its chief ornaments and my friend. She was a luxurious woman of great beauty, with perfect manners and a moderate sense of duty. She was the last word in refinement, perception and charm. There was something septic in her nature and I heard her say one day that the sound of the cuckoo made her feel ill; but, although she was not lazy and seldom idle, she never developed her intellectual powers or sustained herself by reading or study of any kind. She had not the smallest sense of proportion and, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... My love each man of its inheritance. Sweet the voice of the cuckoo, on bending bough, ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... a-coming in, Loud sing cuckoo; Groweth seed and bloweth mead, And springeth the wood new, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... softly.] which were very destructive to human beings—devouring men, women, and children greedily whenever they could catch them. Such a terror were they that the tribes had to protect their village with high walls, [Footnote: Can this have anything to do with the idea of walling-in the cuckoo?] and then they slept securely, for the Roh hunted by night. This old chieftain determined to watch the birds, and find out their nesting-places; so he had a series of towers built, in which the watchmen could sleep securely by night. These towers were advanced in whatever ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... call of the cuckoo, Soft little globes of bosom-shaped sound, Came and went at the window; And, out in the great green world, Those maidens each morn the flowers Opened their white little bodices wide to the sun: And the man sighed—sighed—in his sleep, And ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... or less, results of interference and disquietude. And thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of sound heard, its repetition of the notes or syllables of sound, gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the notes of the cuckoo. Understanding this, observe the anxious doubling of every object by a visible echo or shadow throughout this picture. The grandest feature of it is the steep distant cliff; and therefore the dualism is more marked here than elsewhere; the two promontories or ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... called the bird "the cuckoo." But only one Indian knew how the cuckoo came to be, and why it is too lazy ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... the old wall of Chester is wonderfully interesting and beautiful. At one part it overlooks a wide level field, over which the annual races are run. I noticed that here as elsewhere the short grass was starred with daisies. They are not considered in place in a well-kept lawn. But remembering the cuckoo song in "Love's Labour's Lost," "When daisies pied ... do paint the meadows with delight," it was hard to look at them ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Balm (Bee-balm); Brake; Carnation (Bizarre Dianthus caryophyllus); Clover (Crimson Trifolium incarnatus); Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris); Cowslip (Primula veris); Crowflower (Ragged Robin, Lychnis floscuculi); Cuckoo Buds (Butter cups, Ranunculus acris); Daisies (Bellis perennis); Eryngium M. (Sea Holly); Flax; Flower de luce (Iris Germanica, blue); Fumitory (Dicentra spectabilis; Bleeding Heart); Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia); Larksheel (Delphinium elatum, Bee Larkspur); Peony; Pinks (Dianthus Plumarius); ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... could easily reach the city by sun-down, we all enjoyed our siesta. About half-past three, the doves began to coo, and that made the monkey sit up and listen. Being a dweller of the trees by birth, Kopee was always sensitive to tree sounds. Soon a cuckoo called from the distance and in a few moments the caravan was ready to move on. Nothing exciting happened the rest of ...
— Kari the Elephant • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... giant-shadow, clad in air and sunshine, appeared in view. We had a pleasant day's walk. We passed Smollett's monument on the road (somehow these poets touch one in reflection more than most military heroes)—talked of old times; you repeated Logan's beautiful verses to the cuckoo,* which I wanted to compare with Wordsworth's, but my courage failed me; you then told me some passages of an early attachment which was suddenly broken off; we considered together which was the most to be pitied, a disappointment in love where the attachment was mutual or one ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... name on account of the similarity of its note to that of the Cuckoo-clock, was one of the earliest sufferers of the housing problem, which it successfully solved by depositing its eggs in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... yawned with the whole Midsummer holiday in his jaws. "Up on Grefsen ridge, cold punch had flowed down the hill as good as free. Veyergang's son had given the girls at the factory an old boat from Maridal Lake and half a barrel of pitch; heard the cuckoo and had larks all night—came down again when it was nearly ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... Cuckoo Clock on the nursery wall went, "Whirrr!" the little door opened, and the little bird put out his head and cried, ...
— Raggedy Andy Stories • Johnny Gruelle
... what?" asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last "I see," and popped back, clapping shut the door ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... (Dendrocolaptidae), together with a large proportion of the wood-warblers (Mniotiltidae), the finches, the wrens, and some other groups. In the eastern hemisphere, also, we have the babbling-thrushes (Timaliidae), the cuckoo-shrikes (Campephagidae), the honey-suckers (Meliphagidae), and several other smaller groups which are certainly not coloured above the average standard ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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, ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... aquaticum, mustard, sinapis, scurvy-grass cochlearia hortensis, horse-radish cochlearia armoracia, cuckoo-flower, cardamine, dog's-grass, dandelion, leontodon taraxacon, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... she might with her busy needle, the day was drearily long; and few genuine cuckoo-carols have been listened to with such grateful rejoicing as greeted those metallic gutturals that once in every sixty minutes issued from the throat of the gaudy automaton ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... in the notion of the Cricket with its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounding through the house, and seeming to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star, Dickens, and no other could, by any chance, have conjured up the forms of either Caleb Plummer, or Gruff-and-Tackleton. The cuckoo on the Dutch clock, now like a spectral voice, now hiccoughing on the assembled company, as if he had got drunk for joy; the little haymaker over the dial mowing down imaginary grass, jerking right and left with his scythe in front of a Moorish palace; the hideous, hairy, red-eyed jacks-in-boxes; ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of the hostile winds, might be seen crossing the intersected streets, and vanishing amid the subterranean recesses of some kitchen area, or tramping onward amidst the mazes of the metropolitan labyrinth, till, like the cuckoo, "heard," but no longer "seen," the echo of her retreating pattens made a dying music to the reluctant ear; or indeed, at intervals of unfrequent occurrence, a hackney vehicle jolted, rumbling, bumping over the uneven stones, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... delight the boy had; he knew the magic of sound, which spoke to his heart in a way that it speaks to but few; the sounds of the earth gave up their sweets to him; the musical fluting of owls, the liquid notes of the cuckoo, the thin pipe of dancing flies, the mournful creaking of the cider-press, the horn of the oxherd wound far off on the hill, the tinkling of sheep-bells—of all these he knew the notes; and not only these, but the rhythmical swing of the ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... landmarks again, and got back into the "feel" of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's way down country lanes—"The Veritable Cuckoo" and "The Lost Corner" and "The Flower of the Fields"—and the first smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area of constant ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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 some wild moor, torn by the wind, or drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... cuckoo (both species) is supposed by all hunters to foretell rain, when its "Kow, kow, kow" ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... all the vivacity of romance. Scott's second novel, "Guy Mannering," was attacked with some viciousness in the periodical of which he was practically the founder, and already the critic was anxious to repeat what Scott, talking of Pope's censors, calls "the cuckoo cry of written out'!" The notice of "Waverley" in the "Edinburgh Review" by Mr. Jeffrey was not so slight and so unworthy of the topic. The novel was declared, and not unjustly, to be "very hastily, and in many places very unskilfully, written." The Scotch ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... a fine morning of summer, and I saw a kingfisher across the watermeadows coming along. Oh, and there's a cuckoo back in the fir plantation, singing with a May voice. It must have been asleep ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... country, for in those days I had a great desire to be alone. I stood long beside a stile in the pastures, a little village below me, and the gables and chimneys of an old farmhouse stood up over wide fields of young waving wheat. A cuckoo fluted in an elm close by, and at the sound there darted into my mind the memory, seen in an airy perspective, of innumerable happy and careless days, spent in years long past, with eager and light-hearted ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fields; here and there pleasant hedgerows; on the slopes of Sydenham Hill charming woodlands, some of them a veritable sanctuary for bird-life. In the spring-time the whole neighbourhood is musical with the song of birds, and one is often thrilled by the rich haunting note of the cuckoo. On the fringes of the playing-fields and round about the boarding-houses are magnificent trees—chiefly elm, beech, birch and chestnut, more rarely oak. In short, the surroundings of the college have a thoroughly rural aspect. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... her arms. As she was the first voluntary contributor of live stock, she was warmly welcomed, and a great fuss made over the tiny black infant which gradually emerged from the folds of an old shawl "like a cuckoo out of its cocoon," as Mary Quinn remarked. This, of course, was very nice and encouraging, but most unfortunately, when night came, the mother did not appear to claim her progeny, nor did she ever turn up again. Of course it ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... "blessed bird" and "sweet messenger of spring," the "cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... found the Lake of Geneva and the Rhine not much gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until at last, in desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better citizen. Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred to Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers to come, he hid ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... little nose, peeping out from his basket or from your muff, and I occasionally hear his wheezy little bark when you take him for a walk up and down the corridor. You can't expect one to get extravagantly fond of a dog of that sort. One might as well work up an affection for the cuckoo in a cuckoo-clock." ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... the nest Where, as a lonely guest, First thy young head did rest, Cuckoo, so dear! Strange to the father-bird, Strange to the mother-bird, Sounded the note they heard, Tender and clear. Fleeing thy native bow'rs, Bright with the silv'ry flow'rs, Oft in the summer hours Hither thou fliest; Light'st on some orange tall, ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... noticed the room 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
... where the poet was wont to murmur his verses as they came. Within the house were disposed his simple treasures: the ancestral almery, on which the names of unknown Wordsworths may be deciphered still; Sir George Beaumont's pictures of "The White Doe of Rylstone" and "The Thorn," and the cuckoo clock which brought vernal thoughts to cheer the sleepless bed of age, and which sounded its noonday summons when ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... to her brother that she knew where their parents' cuckoo-clock was—Coaly Mathew had bought it. And that very evening the children stood outside the house and waited for the cuckoo to sing; and when ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... she should have the complexion of chocolate and cream; "her face should be as the full moon, her nose smooth as a flute; she should have eyes like unto lotuses, and a neck like a pigeon's; her voice should be soft as the cuckoo's, and her step as the gait of a young elephant of pure blood." Let ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... cuckoo is heard for the first time in the season, it is customary to turn the money in the pocket, and wish. If within the bounds of reason, it is sure to be fulfilled. In reference to the pecuniary idea respecting ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... webs of gold and green Rainbow sheen Mesh the maze of flower and fern, Cuckoo-grass and meadow-sweet, And the wheat Where the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... assumptions, viz., that some at least among migratory birds must possess, by inheritance alone, a very precise knowledge of the particular direction to be pursued. It is without question an astonishing fact that a young cuckoo should be prompted to leave its foster parents at a particular season of the year, and without any guide to show the course previously taken by its own parents, but this is a fact which must be met by any theory of instinct which aims at being complete. ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... lyrics of the poet, the magic of the emotions of Shelley and Poe, for instance, with their marvelous music and exquisite intonings of feeling, furnish us with important information. They are the facts of the sex life, as much as the song of the nightingale, or the mocking laughter of the cuckoo pursued by its mate. So Sappho and Elizabeth Browning, to take only two samples, have contributed some of the feminine reaction. The erotic motive in literature has but paralleled the erotic motive in life, with all ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the move, however; and had his spasms, two to the second, all right and regular. But, his sufferings when the clock was going to strike, were frightful to behold; and, when a Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or like a something wiry, plucking ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... and brightness in her as in those others; her little mouth is as sweet as the cuckoo on the branch. You would not find a mind like hers in any woman since the pearl ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... "as far as I know: 'One flew east and one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo's nest.'" I wish I could convey by words the lilt of her clear, fearless, boyish voice, the sparkle of mischief and daring in her eyes, and deep beneath, like treasures in the sea, that look of steadfastness, of praying, that ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... broadly be described as instinctive. In the eighth chapter of "The Origin of Species" Darwin says ("Origin of Species" (6th edition), page 205.), "I will not attempt any definition of instinct... Every one understands what is meant, when it is said that instinct impels the cuckoo to migrate and to lay her eggs in other birds' nests. An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... being overfed with jam. Imagine, in our dear country, an Englishman being allowed to mount the platform and spout, undisturbed, English propaganda in deadly opposition to German interests. The so-called liberty of the Englishman is like the cuckoo in his political nest. Countries must be governed. They cannot govern themselves. The time of war ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the birds filled the air with joyous music. The thrush and blackbird mingled their strong vigorous voices, with the mellowed trilling of the skylark, and over the fields could be heard almost continuously the call of the cuckoo—now here, now there, as the active creature plied her restless wing from one hedge-tree to another. There was a strong sweet perfume in the air like the scent of almonds, for the white thorn was now expanding its umbels of aromatic flowers, and there was ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... worn out with poverty and hard work—not like the lovely Mrs. Q., who has nothing to do all day except spend the money that I ought to have. I'll tell you what it is, my fine fellow: you had better be careful, or I'll have that pretty cuckoo out of her soft nest, and pluck her borrowed feathers off her, like the monkey did ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... greensward slopes to a wheat-field that is like a wall of gold. Here I lie and laze away the time, or dip into a favorite book, Stevenson's Letters or Belloc's Path to Rome. Bees drone in the wild thyme; a cuckoo keeps calling, a lark spills jeweled melody. Then there is a seeming silence, but it is the silence of a ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... we can hardly reach here in months of unremitting search. In birds there is the same difference. In most parts of tropical America we may always find some species of woodpecker tanager, bush shrike, chatterer, trogon, toucan, cuckoo, and tyrant-flycatcher; and a few days' active search will produce more variety than can be here met with in as many months. Yet, along with this poverty of individuals and of species, there are in ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... clock, which 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 ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... one summer morn, When all was on the wing: I heard the cuckoo tell his name, I heard the lark to sing. I left the Tower upon the hill Dedicated to the Queen, And for old Keighley back again, ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... wastes, sunsets wrap them in atmospheric glory, or dreamy noons brood over them with deep calm. Between Zennor and St. Ives is the parish of Towednack, where they tried to build a hedge around the cuckoo. It is just a symbol of our craving to keep the springtime ever with us; the hedge was not high enough, and the cuckoo flew out at the top. The name of the hamlet was formerly Towynnok, which evidently embodies ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... the parsonage-house, backed by woodlands, and a little noisy rill running in front. The birds were still in the hedgerows, only, as if from the very heart of the most distant woods, there came now and then the mellow note of the cuckoo. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... on the top of a dais sat the Goat-King—a snow-white Goat with mauve eyes and beard; completely surrounded with cuckoo clocks, and festoons of yellow wood table-napkin rings, and paper-cutters. The walls seemed to be covered with them, and the pendulums of the clocks were ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... eyes follow him as he left the room. "And that about lets me out," he told himself; "he thinks I've gone cuckoo, now." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... 'Mash,' a meadow which was almost a water-meadow; and the other inside a withy-bed. She pulled the 'cat's-tails,' as she learned to call the horse-tails, to see the stem part at the joints; and when the mowing-grass began to grow long, picked the cuckoo-flowers and nibbled the stalk and leaflets to essay the cress-like taste. In the garden, which was full of old-fashioned shrubs and herbs, she watched the bees busy at the sweet-scented 'honey-plant,' and sometimes peered under the sage-bush ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... isn't he awfully cute!" To say that he is very nice would be too weak a way to express her admiration. When a handsome girl appears on the street an enthusiastic masculine admirer, to express his appreciation of her beauty, tells you: "She is a peach, a bird, a cuckoo," any of which accentuates his estimation of the young lady and is much more emphatic than saying: "She is a beautiful girl," "a handsome maiden," or "lovely ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... of conventional phrases, links in the great cuckoo-chain, universal pill-venders, Satan, and ancient booksellers' ancient nameless hacks can ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... lady of the Wren family, must always strike naturalists as an absurdity; and, I suppose, we may not ask how it was the banns were not forbidden, since the Messrs. Wren, with the children, and the whole creation of birds—with the single exception of a blackguard cuckoo—have jubilantly acquiesced ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... lamina are beginning to grow, making them more like other birds'. A future generation will undoubtedly wonder where this peculiar kind of thrush got his unusual tongue and tail, just as we wonder at the deformed little feet and strange ways of a cuckoo. ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... 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
... walls, filtering through the high nursery "guard" which protected Robin from annihilation by fire, and the whisper, whisper of their voices had only emphasized the quiet. And, with every moment that went by, the lit-up tower had seemed more like a symbol to Dion. Then at last the cuckoo-clock had chimed and the wooden bird, with trembling tail, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the rosy-bosom'd Hours, Fair Venus' train, appear, Disclose the long-expecting flowers, And wake the purple year! The Attic warbler pours her throat, 5 Responsive to the cuckoo's note, The untaught harmony of spring; While, whispering pleasure as they fly, Cool Zephyrs thro' the clear blue sky Their gather'd ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... already upon the land, flowers were blooming, and the reign of sunshine had begun. The cuckoo haunted the Hall gardens, rabbits basked in the glades, and the woods were alive ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... 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
... THE cuckoo and the coo-dove's ceaseless calling, Calling, Of a meaningless monotony is palling All my morning's pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered wood. May-blossom and blue bird's-eye flowers falling, Falling In a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling Messages of true-love down the dust of the ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... Buck'buck. It may be heard nearly every night during winter, uttering a cry, corresponding with that word. . . .The lower order of the settlers in New South Wales are led away by the idea that everything is the reverse in that country to what it is in England : and the cuckoo, as they call this bird, singing by night, is one of the instances ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... to me; but as she turned to go her hump became visible, and I saw that there was an opening in it, and there popped out from this hole the green head of a parrot which the old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, "Cuckoo," in a thin, squeaking, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the frightful old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that "Cuckoo!" a cold perspiration formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared and then I realized that ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... displayed all the creative luxury and all the brilliant difficulties of foreign music. The child of nature listens with indifference to the incomprehensible sounds; but suddenly Vorobieva with her nightingale voice trills out—The cuckoo from out the firs so dank hath not cuckooed. Look what a change comes over the half-asleep listener. Thus it was with Anastasia! Till this moment Selinova had spoken to her in a strange language, had only uttered sounds unintelligible to her; but the instant that she spoke the native ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... in splinters, the greater part of a wooden staircase of six steps and a landing—but after some three years he too was taken ill, and died before the kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of 'Cuckoo!' Since then ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... zummer hums O' bees; and don' know when the cuckoo comes; But night and day I hear the bombs We threw at Valencieen . ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... shelf in Little Boy Blue's room stood a little blue clock. And every morning at five o'clock the door of the clock flew open, and a cuckoo came out. The cuckoo said, "Cuck-oo," five times, and then went into the little blue clock again, and the little door closed after him. Then Little Boy Blue knew it was time to ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... on. Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithology than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for ants. The redbird comes, too, if only to see what a friendly covert its branches form; ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... he said, but for one moment Wendy saw the romantic figure come to rest on the cuckoo clock. 'O the lovely!' she cried, though Tink's face was ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... ten, out of pure pity, young Friedrich was rescued from the cuckoo's nest by an uncle who had a big family of his own and love without limit. There was a goodly brood left, so little Friedrich, slim, slender, yellow, pensive and sad, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... the bitter spurges, and the stringy inedible bracken. So, too, 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 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... shone into the room. The Swiss cuckoo clock struck ten—eleven—twelve. The merchant could not sleep. He was haunted by the fiery eyes that he had seen ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth |
