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More "Chirp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drink was a reminder to them that they had no time to spare, and an incentive to avoid dawdling on the way. The multitudinous insect-life of the forest was already awake and stirring, the hum and chirp of the myriad winged things causing the air fairly to vibrate with softly strident sound, to which was added the rolling chorus of innumerable frogs inhabiting the marshy low-lying patches contiguous to the river margin. Great gorgeously ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Underfoot the dirt was cool. It yielded itself deliciously to Gwendolyn's bare tread. Overhead, shading the way, were green boughs, close-laced, but permitting glimpses of blue. Upon this arbor, bouncing along with an occasional chirp of contentment, and with the air of one who has assumed ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... turned away from him, out of pity. He had the expression of a man that's fell down a hundred-foot prospect hole and been struck by lightning before he touched bottom. He grabbed aholt of the minister and swallered and swallered, unable to chirp. ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... sashes! The witch-grass round the hazel spring May sharply to the night-air sing, But there no more shall withered hags Refresh at ease their broomstick nags, Or taste those hazel-shadowed waters As beverage meet for Satan's daughters; No more their mimic tones be heard, The mew of cat, the chirp of bird, Shrill blending with the hoarser laughter Of the fell demon following after! The cautious goodman nails no more A horseshoe on his outer door, Lest some unseemly hag should fit To his own mouth her bridle-bit; The goodwife's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... watershed of the lower bank of the Congo. From the cliff above starlings flew out to seek their feeding-haunts where the big game fed; and there was a familiar visitor near them in the black and drab stone-chat, whose scolding chirp they had so often heard in England among the gorse and bramble. The metallic cry of guinea-fowl down by the little river had a farm-yard ring; but the chatter of parrots flying overhead was still new, and so with many other calls, ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... call on the host of stars, And the cold and dimly shining moon, And the spirits, that watch by night in the air, Or chirp in the hollow oak[E], to see The plighting of their hands: They married themselves, And man and ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... buffalo close, so that they may be killed. The stone is found on the prairie, and any one who finds one is thought to be very lucky. Sometimes a man who is going along on the prairie will hear a queer faint chirp, such as a little bird might make. He knows this sound is made by a buffalo stone. He stops and searches for it on the ground, and if he cannot find it, marks the place and comes back next day to look for it again. If it is found, he and all his family are glad. The ...
— Blackfeet Indian Stories • George Bird Grinnell
... in my breast. Yet how ecstatically sweet, Was its first soft tumultuous beat! I little thought that beat could be The harbinger of misery; And daily, when the morning beam Dawned earliest on wood and stream, When, from each brake and bush were heard, The hum of bee, and chirp of bird, From these, earth's matin songs, my ear Would turn, a sweeter voice to hear— A voice, whose tones the very air Seemed trembling with delight to bear; From leafy wood, and misty stream, From bush, and brake, and morning beam, Would turn away my wandering eye, A dearer ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... cricket, to Ratibor, and chirp in his ear that I love him only, but that I am held captive by the gnome in his ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... way past dense underbrush into the forest proper. Here he walked through shaded groves of giant oaks. All around him was the chirp and bustle of unseen bird and animal life. Far in front of him was a large white sign nailed to a tree. Barrent reached it, and read: FORESTDALE NATIONAL PARK. PICNICKERS ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... were lodged in Wai-pi'o, Beheld Hi'i-lawe, the grand. We brought and cut for our love-wreath The rich hala drupe from Naue's strand, 5 Tufted lehua that waves on the cliff; Then sat and gave ear to song of o-o, Or harked the chirp of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... until the yellow serpents of flame crept, red-tongued through the interstices of the lower logs, and the larger and upper began to sing the low, drowsy tune, more suggestive of home-cheer and fireside comfort than the shrill, monotonous chirp of the famous cricket on the hearth. The pipe-clayed bricks on which the andirons rested were next swept clean; the hearth-brush hung up on its nail, and the architect of the edifice stepped back ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... glades there were glimpses of brilliant color in the foliage—the glow of the laburnum, the lilac blaze of the rhododendron bushes. And how still the place was! Far off there was a dull roar of carriages in Piccadilly; but here there was nothing but the bleating of the sheep, the chirp of the young birds, the stir of the wind among the elms. Sometimes he could now catch the sound of ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... to do so. For at this juncture, as had so often happened when this girl and I were closeted, the conversation once more went blue on us. The night breeze whispered, but not the Bassett. A bird twittered, but not so much as a chirp escaped Bertram. It was perfectly amazing, the way her mere presence seemed to wipe speech from my lips—and mine, for that matter, from hers. It began to look as if our married life together would be rather like twenty years among ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... forward promptly, with a jerk as if to throw off her irresolution, and a certain consternation. "Yes, I s'pose I do," said she, in a voice like a shrill high chirp. "It's Mis' Maxwell, ain't it—Edward's wife? How do you do, Esther? I hadn't seen you for so long, I wasn't quite sure, but I see who you are now. How ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... baby-treat; Nor, I deem, for me unmeet; [4] Here, for neither Babe nor [5] me, Other play-mate can I see. Of the countless living things, 45 That with stir of feet and wings (In the sun or under shade, Upon bough or grassy blade) And with busy revellings, Chirp and song, and murmurings, 50 Made this orchard's narrow space, And this vale so blithe a place; Multitudes are swept away Never more to breathe the day: Some are sleeping; some in bands 55 Travelled into distant lands; Others slunk to moor and wood, Far from human neighbourhood; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Turpin; "just tighten her girths, Grasshopper, and bring her after me, and thou shalt have wherewithal to chirp over thy cups ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the soft twilight of a summer's morning, and the little birds had begun to chirp their matins, and the lark to brush the dew from her speckled breast, waiting for the first gaze of the sun. The old man pressed the infant closer to his bosom as he drew nigh to the steep acclivity, the solitary dwelling of the eagle. He kissed the babe; then looking round, fearful of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... is the most beautiful of all months. Then it is, that all nature seems to awaken from its winter slumbers. The grass springs up, the little birds sing and chirp, and display their beautiful plumage. The trees shoot forth their buds, the fruitful covering of future foliage. We no longer greet each other in the warmed room, but, "Good morning," is sweetly spoken from the open window, or among the bushes of the garden. ...
— The Girl's Cabinet of Instructive and Moral Stories • Uncle Philip
... had forgot their hardships; But not to chant and carol in the air, Or lightly swing upon some waving bough, And merrily return each other's notes; No; silently they hop from bush to bush, Yet find no seeds to stop their craving want, Then bend their flight to the low smoking cot, Chirp on the roof, or at the window peck, To tell their wants to those who lodge within. The poor lank hare flies homeward to his den, But little burthen'd with his nightly meal Of wither'd greens grubb'd from the farmer's garden; A poor and scanty portion snatch'd in fear; And fearful ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... mair by Babel streams we'll weep, To think upon our Zion; And hing our fiddles up to sleep, [hang] Like baby-clouts a-dryin'; Come, screw the pegs wi' tunefu' cheep, [chirp] And o'er the thairms be tryin'; [strings] O, rare! to see our elbucks wheep, [elbows jerk] And a' like lamb-tails ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... about the Roman villa as soon as Marcus was left alone. All seemed to have grown painfully still. It was fancy, no doubt, but, to the boy, the birds had ceased to sing and chirp among the trees, the sounds from the farm were distant, and though more than once Marcus listened intently he did not hear Serge go to or from his room, nor his step ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... doubtless, passing through the Ring, Me you have seen in autumn, summer, spring— Picking, with gleesome chirp, and nimble feet, My scanty living from the public street; Or else devouring in those golden hours, Insects from cabbages and other flowers:— Ah me! those happy days!—but they are past, And winter with his harsh and biting blast Remind me and my fellow-sparrows bold Of coming snow-storms, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... days are here; Warm on my cheek the sunshine burns, And fledged birds chirp, and far and near Floats the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... also suggested its probable size when unbroken. It was perhaps two inches long. As there are little horny rings round the wing base like those which crickets have, on which they rub their legs and so "chirp," it is also quite likely that this insect of hoary antiquity did the same, and enlivened the silence of Devonian fern groves with a prehistoric hum. It is quite in keeping with modern ideas that in that age of fishes one of the most remarkable insects ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... thrust it back. It did not suit to-day. Hours passed. The night crept on towards morning, colder, stiller. Faint bars of gray fell on the stretch of hill-tops, broad and pallid. The shaggy peaks blanched whiter in it. You could hear from the road-bushes the chirp of a snow-bird, wakened by the tramp of his horse, or the flutter of its wings. Overhead, the stars disappeared, like flakes of fire going out; the sky came nearer, tinged with healthier blue. He could see the mountain where the Gap was, close at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... for even the domestics hardly spoke above a whisper; and then we sat in the soft moonlight and looked on the sleeping scene before us. The summer sounds of rural life had long died away, and nothing but the untiring chirp of the tree-toad was to be heard. The melancholy monotony of the scene hushed Mary's spirit to a quiet she had not for a long time known, and at last she became conscious ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... glow of the day god as it comes peeping through the windows of the morning, then see the birds leave their bowers, the larks to fly away to the fields, the mocking-bird to sing in the cedar at the garden gate, the robin to chirp to its mate, and you will see a picture which will pale that ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... imperishable record of our shame. Then they loosed the men and bade them form in rank. The soldiers came out of the dark vans, in which they had been confined, with some eagerness, and began at once to chirp and joke, which seemed to me most ill-timed good humour. We waited altogether for about twenty minutes. Now for the first time since my capture I hated the enemy. The simple, valiant burghers at the front, fighting bravely as they had been told 'for their farms,' claimed respect, if not ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... round His purposes in ways undreamed by us, And makes the wicked but his instruments To hasten their own swift and sudden fall, I see the beauty of his providence In the King's order: blind, he will not let His doom part from him, but must bid it stay 120 As 't were a cricket, whose enlivening chirp He loved to hear beneath his very hearth. Why should we fly? Nay, why not rather stay And rear again our Zion's crumbled walls, Not, as of old the walls of Thebes were built, By minstrel twanging, but, if need should be, With the more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... usually convulsed. "It must be shocking bad form to double up in public as they did; a photograph of them would have served as an up-to-date advertisement of the latest thing in gramaphones, and when I came to that touching line, about the poor bird sighing out its last feeble chirp ere it closed its eyes and died, those two very ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... were washed—when the shadows of evening crept in past the lamp, no longer able to exclude them, she began to feel lonely and sad. And as the notes of Aaron's flute mingled with the night sounds, the chirp of crickets, the hum of insects, she felt, rather than thought, "Life is so much spilt milk. And all that comes of fancies, is Aaron's flute, playing down there in ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... eyes last night and I'm not feeling well today, so I'm not going to get up for a while. I wish you would tell your uncle that Mrs. Matchan can't practice this morning. I must get some sleep. What's that in the kitchen?" she demanded as she heard a happy chirp-chirp. ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... flew over the blue bosom of Windermere; every bush, every tree—yea, it seemed as if every branch sent forth the music of singing birds, and the very air was redolent with melody, from the bold songs of the thrush and the lark to the love-note of the wood-pigeon; and even the earth rejoiced in the chirp of the grasshopper, its tiny but pleasant musician. The fields and the leaves were in the loveliness and freshness of youth, luxuriating in the sunbeams, in the depth of their summer green; and the butterfly sported, and the bee pursued its errand ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... the glass globes, where they were gazing at the fish they saw not, she raised them with a despairing action, as if to invoke the skies. Her sufferings seemed of a kind that are told to God alone. The silence was unbroken save for the chirp of crickets and the shrill whirr of a few locusts, coming from the little garden then hotter than an oven, and the dull sound of silver and plates, and the moving of chairs in the adjoining room, where a servant was preparing ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... fool's bolt misses! What help? the world is full of loves; Night after night of running kisses, Chirp ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... aliens have any right to see,—how you can see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from us." They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... doorway, and their straw hats were turned sociably towards one another, now and then, as they exchanged a syllable or two, and there was a mild luminousness of pleasure in the recesses of their pale-blue eyes. The evening darkened fast into night. The plaintive half-chirp, half-whistle of a tree-toad fell in monotonous repetition ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... up and down, stretching their hands nervously as if unused to gloves. Presently they fell back, and the organ, in the hands of an amateur performer and an inadequate blower, began to chirp and hoot merrily, by which we knew the bridal party was about ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... little sparrows chirp, An' answers th' raven's call; He'll never see one want for owt, ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... wizard-work of silver lace, I draw my sofa on the rug, Before the ancient chimney-place. Upon the painted tiles are mosques And minarets, and here and there A blind muezzin lifts his hands, And calls the faithful unto prayer. Folded in idle, twilight dreams, I hear the hemlock chirp and sing, As if within its ruddy core It held the happy heart of Spring. Ferdousi never sang like that, Nor Saadi grave, nor Hafiz gay; I lounge, and blow white rings of smoke, And watch them ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... full of debris, now disintegrated into one solid mass, and covered with vegetation. You can lie on the blossoming clover, where the bees hum and the crickets chirp around you, and can look through the arch which frames its own fair picture. In the foreground lies the steep slope overgrown with bayberry and gay with thistle blooms; then the little winding cove with its bordering cliffs; and the rough pastures ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... growth, and was rapidly turning the brown, withered sward of winter into emerald. The sun shone through a slight haze, but shone warmly. The birds had opened the day with full orchestra, but at noon there was little more than chirp and twitter, they seeming to feel something of Edith's languor, as she leaned on the railing of the porch, and watched for the coming of Malcom. She sighed as she looked at the bare brown earth of the large space that she purposed for strawberries, and work ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... I know the gracious mother's wiles And dear delusive smiles! No callow fledgling of her singing brood But tastes that witching food, And hearing overhead the eagle's wing, And how the thrushes sing, Vents his exiguous chirp, and from his nest Flaps forth—we know the rest. I own the weakness of the tuneful kind,— Are not all harpers blind? I sang too early, must I sing too late? The lengthening shadows wait The first pale stars of ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the mild sunlight of the autumn morning. Suddenly, great excitement in the cages. The Chaffinches chirp their rallying-cry: ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... And the veery, Answer each other. I hear the voices Of happy children And the baying of hounds Float up from the valley; The chirp of the cricket At my feet, and, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... forward in his low chair. The chaffinch gave a light chirp, as if to recall him to his duty. Hadria performed it for him. The chaffinch flew ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... off, for I was intensely thirsty. Axinya had quite recently scrubbed the table and benches, and there was that smell in the kitchen which is found in bright, snug kitchens kept by tidy cooks. And that smell and the chirp of the cricket used to lure us as children into the kitchen, and put us in the mood for hearing fairy tales and playing at "Kings" ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... but scarcely had he uttered the words when the cricket in the chimney corner chirped loudly, and his shrill notes seemed to say: "The king—the king." Rodolph could hardly believe his ears. How had the cricket learned to chirp these words? It was beyond all understanding. But still the cricket chirped, and still his musical monotone seemed to say, "The king—the king," until, with an angry frown, Rodolph strode from his house, leaving the child to hear the cricket's ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far off, from some farmhouse away among the hills—but it was like a dreaming sound in his ear. No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog from a neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably and ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... walls high over his head. Not a ray of sunlight penetrated into the soundless gloom. Not a leaf shivered in the still air. The creek gurgled and spattered among its rocks, without the note of a bird or the chirp of a squirrel to interrupt its monotony. Everything was dead. Now and then Rod could hear the wind whispering over the top of the chasm. But not a breath of it came down to him. Under his feet was only sufficient snow to deaden his own footsteps, and he still carried his snow-shoes ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... allusions to "little Robert"—evidently William Roscoe's son—do not occur in the former, and many slight improvements, tending to make the verses more rhythmical and flowing, are introduced. The whole passage, "Then close on his haunches" (p. 7) to "Chirp his own praises the rest of the night," &c. (p. 10), is an interpolation in this later edition. It is, I believe, certain that the verses were written by Roscoe for his children on the occasion of the birthday ...
— The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast • Mr. Roscoe
... to the pine-woods above Lamteng in this month, and chirp shrilly in the heat of the day; and glow-worms fly about at night. The common Bengal and Java toad, Bufo scabra, abounded in the marshes, a remarkable instance of wide geographical distribution, for a Batrachian which is common at the level of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... together; the Tartars migrate all the year through, crossing the steppes in winding and devious but fixed paths, paths settled for each family, and kept without a map, though invisible to strangers. It is only necessary to watch the common sparrow. In spring his merry chirp and his few notes of song are heard on the roof or in the garden; here he spends his time till the broods are reared and the corn is ripe. Immediately he migrates into the fields. By degrees he is joined by those left behind to rear second broods, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... height: "When a Mohican Sagamore listens, all Algonquins listen, and the Siwanois clan grow silent in the still places. When a real man speaks, real men listen with respect. Only the Canienga continue to chirp and chatter; only the Long House is full of squirrel sounds and the noise of jays." His lip curled contemptuously. "Let the echoes of the Long House answer the Kanonsis. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Robin, thou hast left us, We shall hear thy chirp no more; Very lonely hast thou left us, And our ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... fields of sarasson, hedged by long banks of earth, which were masses of golden gorse and bronzed and crimson ferns. The sun shone, the clover-scented air was full of the joyous buzzing of bees and chirp of birds. ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... voice the loss of the string and saved the fame of the musician. To this day in Surinam the Dutch call them lyre-players. If there is any truth in the story, the grasshopper then had powers far in advance of his degenerated descendants; for now the grasshopper—like the cricket—has a chirp consisting of three notes in rhythm, always forming a triplet ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... bowed, and proceeded to limp about the apartment, clearing his throat the while with that odd musical chirp which had already grown so irritating in the ears of Denis de Beaulieu. He first possessed himself of some papers which lay upon the table; then he went to the mouth of the passage and appeared to give an order to the men behind the arras; and lastly he hobbled out through the door ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pouring rain, flashing lightning, and pealing thunder. At last the tempest dies away, and in the trio and chorus, "Now cease the Conflicts," night comes on, with its song of the quail,—which Beethoven subsequently utilized in his Pastoral Symphony,—the chirp of the crickets, the croaking of the frogs, the distant chime of the evening bells, and the invocation to sleep. Of the frog ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... lee of a block of granite, sheltered from the cold night wind, found the pipe, and raised it to his lips to blow through the stem, but stopped short with every sense on the alert, for from below to his left he heard a light chirp such as might have been given by a bird, but which he argued certainly was not, for he knew of no bird likely to utter such a note at that time of the evening, when the flood of darkness had risen and risen ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... had chosen, they tell me, a dusk so fair One almost thought there were not such another—there. The air was full of the perfume of pines, and the sweet Sleepy chirp of birds, long the lush soft grass at ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson
... of mighty pow'r, Compact in frame, and strong of limb; Went with a chirp from hour to hour; Whip-cord! 'twas never made ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... as if he had entered unexpectedly into a wonderland of amazing beauty, and that from its dark and hidden bowers, crusted with their glittering mantles of white, snow naiads must be peeping forth at him, holding their breath for fear of betraying themselves to his eyes. There was not the chirp of a bird nor the flutter of a wing—not the breath of a sound to disturb the wonderful silence. He was encompassed in a white, soft world that seemed tremendously unreal—that for some strange reason made him breathe very softly, that made him stand without a movement, and made him listen, as ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... brilliant planet close to her; there was not a breath of air, not a human being near but the soldiers at the gates below, and the monk above with me; not a sound was heard but those occasional noises of the night, the bark of a dog, the chimes from churches and convents, the chirp of a bird, which only served to make silence audible. Though I have seen the Coliseum a dozen times before, I never was so delighted with its beauty and grandeur as to-night. No description in poetry or painting can do it justice; it is a 'wreck of ruinous perfection,' ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... little Mary Samm made answer firmly. 'I love my sisters dearly, dearly,' she raised her voice unconsciously as she spoke, and a chaffinch on a branch overhead filled in the pause with an answering chirp, 'I love my mother too. Didst thou really say thou wert expecting her to visit thee right soon? My dear, dear mother! But I love my dear grandfather best of all, for he hath nobody but me to care for him. At least, of course, he hath thee, Aunt Joan,' she added hastily, noticing ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... willow-wrens; two I know perfectly, but have not been able yet to procure the third. No two birds can differ more in their notes, and that constantly, than those two that I am acquainted with; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note, the other a harsh, loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three-quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drams and a half, while the latter weighs but two; so the songster is one-fifth heavier than the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer-bird of passage that is heard, the wryneck sometimes ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... am going to feed my snow-birds with them; and I should be very happy to have you go with me. I know you will enjoy seeing how merrily they hop about and flutter their wings, and seem to chirp out their thanks as they pick up the food I ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... while the grass yet glittered with pearls of water, and as the birds began to chirp, Belton was led forth to die. Little did those birds know that they were chirping the funeral march of the world's noblest hero. Little did they dream that ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... Mary with the delight in her blue eyes matching that in Uncle Tucker's pair of mystic gray. "I'll come just as soon as I get the skimming done. We'll want some corn meal and millet seed for the chirp-babies, but the others we can leave to the maternal ministrations. I'm so full of welcome I don't see how I'm going to keep ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... now and again; but no one minded that. I don't, nor you needn't, no more than other folk; for the tongue, be it never so bitin', it can't draw blood, mind ye, and hard words break no bones; and I'll make a cup o' tea—ye like a cup o' tea—and we'll take a cup together, and ye'll chirp up a bit, and see how pleasant and ruddy the sun shines ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... dwell upon her slender hands, swiftly, capably busy, her tawny hair, her sun-browned cheeks and the creamy curve of her brow, the blue and flash and fathomless depths of her eyes. I remembered the sunlight and freshening breeze upon the hills, the chirp and gentle stirring of the day, the azure sea and far-off, tender mist, the playful breakers, flinging spray high into the yellow sunshine. 'Twas no time now, thought I, to be busied with craft in the gloomy cabin of the Shining Light, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... desk to whisper to swell to chirp sneering more and more he climbed the pulpit steps they never ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... lantern, waves the dim angels' heads upon the corbels of the roof, seeming to watch their progress. Anon they turn into narrower and steeper staircases, and the night-air begins to blow upon them, and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened rook precedes the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the beating down of dust and straws upon their heads. At last, leaving their light behind a stair—for it blows fresh up here—they look down on Cloisterham, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... little mother. Don't be afraid," whispered the child; and, as if it understood, the bird settled down on her nest with a comfortable chirp, while its mate hopped up to give her a nice ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... grace, in sins and darkness dwell. The egg, when laid, by warmth is made a chicken, And Christ, by grace, those dead in sin doth quicken. The egg, when first a chick, the shell's its prison; So's flesh to the soul, who yet with Christ is risen. The shell doth crack, the chick doth chirp and peep, The flesh decays, as men do pray and weep. The shell doth break, the chick's at liberty, The flesh falls off, the soul mounts up on high But both do not enjoy the self-same plight; The soul is safe, the chick now ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... which thus reacts to the vibration. This seems to be very often "tuned," as it were, to the sounds made by the particular species in which it is found. A cricket will at times be unaffected by any sound, however loud, while at the slightest "screek" or chirp of its own species, no matter how faint, it will start its own ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... be found in the mountains of Hawaii, a fact of marked interest to science in observing environmental effect upon the differentiation of species. One of these the natives call pupu kani oi or "shrill voiced snail," averring that a certain cricketlike chirp that rings through the stillness of the almost insectless valleys is the voice of this particular species. Emerson says that the name kahuli is applied to the land snail to describe the peculiar tilting motion as the snail crawls first to one side ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... they were flapped by the winds; red leaves on the tree tops swaying to and fro; groves picture-like, half stripped of foliage; the western breeze coming with sudden gusts, and the wail of the oriole still audible; the warm sun shining with genial rays, and the cicada also adding its chirp: structures, visible to the gaze at a distance in the South-east, soaring high on various sites and resting against the hills; three halls, visible near by on the North-west, stretching in one connected line, on the bank of the stream; strains of music filling the pavilion, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Sister Lizzie's bed, and looked so pretty in her sleep that Abby came three times to wake her, and three times went away again, unable to spoil so perfect a picture. At last, however, the dark eyes opened of their own accord, and Marie began to chirp and twitter, like a bird at daybreak in its nest; only instead of daybreak, it was eight o'clock in the morning, a most shocking hour for anybody to be getting up. But Abby had been in the habit of spoiling her sister, who had a theory that she was never able to do anything early in ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... it. A thousand little scraping noises broke the quiet air, chill and dank. Leaves pattered against each other, twigs rubbed faintly, brittle things broke under the lightest foot. Still hardly a wing unfolded ever so little, not a distressful chirp heralded the slaughter that threatened. Gradually, to eyes growing used to the gloom, differing shades of darkness became apparent; it was faintly marked by them as the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... March, Bobby Hill was wakened by a sound he had not heard since last Fall, "Chirp, ...
— Bobby of Cloverfield Farm • Helen Fuller Orton
... waiting for the moon; and the mysterious night noises from the shore were lulling and drowsy. Gradually the schooner blurred into a vague mass of shadow, out of which the two lights twinkled uncertainly. And mingling with the chirp of insects and the fitful cries of dreaming monkeys came a gnawing and rasping of wood that seemed to echo throughout the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... silent. We pursued our investigations with zeal and finally reached the alley. It had been raining heavily for almost a week, and the alley was a mass of black, sticky mud. Gazing anxiously over the fence, we heard a feeble chirp from a large gob of mud in the alley. ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... features were sharp. On the contrary, they were neat and rounded and well formed, telling of great beauty in youth, but her little face and mouth were of such a form that one was led irresistibly to expect to hear her chirp; she fluttered rather than walked and twittered rather than talked. Altogether she was a charming little old lady, with a pair of bead-like eyes as black as sloes. Happy that captain—a sea-captain, by the way, long since dead—round ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... strawstack, a wee little mite Of a cricket went chirping by day and by night; And further down, still, a cunning blue mouse In a snug little nook of that strawstack kept house! When the cricket went "chirp," Miss Mousie would squeak "Come in," and a blush would enkindle her cheek! She thought—silly girl! 't was a beau come to woo, But I guess it was only ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... is that slight sounds, unnoticed before, are heard; the ticking of the clock, the chirp of a sparrow in the garden, the flight of a butterfly. The world becomes full of imperceptible sounds which invade that deep silence without disturbing it, just as the stars shine out in the dark ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... clumpety-clump!" of a stamp-mill on a shoulder of a hill high above the camp, drowned the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman's strident voice wailing, "She may have seen better da-a-ys," with a mighty effort to ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... thine iron hand Harrow my soul? why calls thy cruel power The fields of England to my exil'd eyes, The joys which once were mine? even now I see The lowly lovely dwelling! even now Behold the woodbine clasping its white walls And hear the fearless red-breasts chirp around To ask their morning meal:—for I was wont With friendly band to give their morning meal, Was wont to love their song, when lingering morn Streak'd o'er the chilly landskip the dim light, And thro' the open'd lattice hung my head To view the snow-drop's bud: ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... thee about, Inverting one swart foot suspensively, And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp Of bird above him on the olive-branch? Frighten him then away! 'twas he who slew Our pigeons, our white pigeons peacock-tailed, That feared not you and me—alas, nor him! I flattened his striped sides along my knee, And reasoned with him on his bloody mind, Till he looked blandly, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... wandered by the brook-side, I wandered by the mill,— I could not hear the brook flow, The noisy wheel was still; There was no burr of grasshopper, No chirp of any bird, But the beating of my own heart Was all ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... was great rejoicing in the royal castle, but the horse did not feed, the bird did not chirp, and the princess ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... of waves. And sometimes, close at band, the branches move, a moan goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's axe. From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by; and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not sweet and rich and near at ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suddenly, for she was choked by her sobs. The whole valley was deserted and silent in the dazzling light, and the overwhelming heat, and only the grasshoppers uttered their shrill, continuous chirp among the sparse, yellow grass on both sides of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of the river we still came across birds and insects, but the further we went the more monotonous and dead Nature became. I could never have pictured such a lifeless wood to myself. No sound of insects was to be heard, no chirp or song of bird; and not even the trail of a serpent ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... was the use in exclaiming when we all felt alike, and could look and see for ourselves? You don't seem to amount to much when you are up, like this, on a mountain, near the sky, with the world spread out below and not missing you; and a boy's voice, or a man's, is about the size of a cricket's chirp. The silence is one of the best things you find. So we ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... exceptional state of things. Of such a morning I have seen a small flock of them collected on the sunny side of a thick hemlock, rather silent and quiet, with ruffled plumage, like balls of gray fur, waiting, with an occasional chirp, for the sun's rays to begin to warm them up, and meanwhile not depressed, but only a little sobered in their deportment, and ready, if the cold continued, to get used to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... was about three inches thick, and at the bottom of the tunnel was excavated quite to the bark. With my thumb I broke in the thin wall, and the young, which were full-fledged, looked out upon the world for the first time. Presently one of them, with a significant chirp, as much as to say, "It is time we were out of this," began to climb up toward the proper entrance. Placing himself in the hole, he looked around without manifesting any surprise at the grand scene that lay spread out before him. He was taking his bearings ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... silent witnesses of Italy's great struggle, were hidden in the dusk, and the cypress sentinels stood up sharp and black against the darkening sky. The band had ceased to play and one heard only the chirp of grasshoppers, and across an orchard the soft sound of Italian speech, and the distant song of two soldiers in the village street. But the warm air, which just now was throbbing with a military march, seemed ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... close behind them. And around him Roger saw, emerging from the semi-dark, faces turning like his own to the summits of the mountains and the billowy splendors there. It grew so dark he could see no more. There fell a deep silence, not a sound but the occasional chirp of a bird or the faint whirr of an insect. Even the glow on the peaks was gone. ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... on wistfully, "When I was nine, I found these little books in our library and after that I enjoyed vicariously the life I had never lived. That's why I like it here—Mrs. Flippin's kettle sings—and the crickets chirp—and Mr. and Mrs. Flippin are ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... squirrels have been festive among the nuts all winter, in the hope of finding, among the myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms. We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... relief and accentuated the faint lines of pain that had come during the last few weeks; a pensive touch had been added to a countenance that combined loveliness with strength. The yellow puff-ball in the gilded cage by the window stirred drowsily, with a faint, comforting chirp. The white and gold of blossoming narcissi, rising from their sheaths of green, gleamed purely from a tabouret, and their ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... genial ideas and softening influences seem to have become things of the long-forgotten past, and then try to imagine a change, compared to which all the transformation scenes of all the pantomimes that ever blazed are as a tomtit's chirp to a lion's roar, or a—a—Words ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... green rushes, and over all the arch of blue summer sky. One or two carriages rolled along the distant road as they sat there; but otherwise; the stillness was unbroken save by the twitter of birds in the woods behind them, the chirp of sand-peeps or the scream of gulls on the beach, and the soft intermittent ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... At a heavy slug, With my rye-beard lance I'd push it along, And they'd think, "All at once we are wondrous strong!" In the nest of the robin, under the eaves Of the apple-leaves, I'd drop a worm in the gaping throats That answer my chirp of the mother's notes. When bonny Miss Harebell thirsts in vain For a drop of rain, I would fill at the brook my shining cap, And lay it all ...
— The Nursery, No. 165. September, 1880, Vol. 28 - A Monthly Magazine For Youngest Readers • Various
... of July, There could not run the smallest breath of wind But all the quarter sounded like a wood; And in the chequered silence and above The hum of city cabs that sought the Bois, Suburban ashes shivered into song. A patter and a chatter and a chirp And a long dying hiss - it was as though Starched old brocaded dames through all the house Had trailed a strident skirt, or the whole sky Even in a ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have never known such a night. The world was stifling in a deluge of gray, cold mists, unstirred by a breath of air. A robin with feathers all ruffled, and head hidden, sat on the gate-post, and chirped a little mournful chirp, like a creature dying in a vacuum. The very daisy that nodded and drooped in the grass at my feet seemed to be gasping for breath. The neighbor's house, not forty paces across the street, was invisible. I remember the sensation ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... for the sport. As the sun rose, however, and they got on the lower ground, the heat increased, and they appeared to have passed into a different region. Occasionally from the woods came the cheerful chirp of the feathered tribe, but otherwise, all around ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... apace. The morning skies were gray monotones, and the evening gorgeous reds. The birds had finished their summer singing. Sometimes the alert chirp of the cardinal suddenly smote the ear from some neighboring tree; but he would pass, a flash of crimson, from one garden to the next, and with another chirp or two be gone for days. The nervy, unmusical waking cry ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the return boys, in the bow of the whaleboat, made the peace sign with his palm extended outward and weaponless, and began to chirp in the unknown Su'u dialect. Van Horn held his aim and waited. The dandy lowered his Snider, and breath came more easily to the chests of all who composed ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... that proceeds from the little warbling host, is the shrill chirp of the hairbird,—occasionally vocal at an hours on a warm summer night. This strain, which is a continued trilling sound, is repeated with diminishing intervals, until it becomes almost incessant. But ere the hairbird has uttered many notes, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... common in India he is sometimes a serious annoyance, because it is almost impossible not to follow him mentally in his incessant repetition of "brain fever." To a few fortunate people his peculiar note does not suggest these words. Even the Indian sparrow drowns conversation with his shrill chirp, taking advantage of the ever-open doors and windows to invade the bungalow, and making determined efforts to make his nest in ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... brought back the spring, Brought back the birds to chirp and sing, Melted the snow and warmed the sky, Little Jack Frost went pouting by. The flowers opened their eyes of blue, Green buds peeped out and grasses grew; It was so warm and scorched him so, Little Jack Frost ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... against and steps taken to have their statements given in such a way that they are audible and intelligible. A few lessons in elementary elocution are generally vitally necessary. The man with the bassoon voice must be tamed, and the birdlike old lady made to chirp more loudly. But all this is the self-evident preparation which must take place in every case, and while highly important is of far less interest than the development of the circumstantial evidence which is the next consideration of the ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... tallest one was Father Chirp; Here was his early home; Here lived his mother And dearest brother, And hither ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... calm and fresh and still; Alone the chirp of flitting bird, And talk of children on the hill, And bell of wandering kine, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... suns and showers, Oh! girlish thorns and flowers, Oh! fruitless days and hours, Oh! groundless hopes and fears: The birds still chirp and twitter, And still the sunbeams glitter: Oh! barren years and bitter, Oh! bitter, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... woman, with a wrinkled yellowish face. She seemed parched up and brittle. Whenever she moved she crackled, and one went in constant dread of seeing a wizen-looking limb break off short like the branch of some dead tree. When she spoke it was in a voice hard and shrill, not unlike the chirp of a cricket. When—as was frequently the case—she clothed her attenuated form in a faded brown silk gown, her resemblance to that lively ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... bark of squirrels and the chirp and twitter of birds that haunted the lonely place ceased and it was night. Only the notes of fall insects in their monotonous and ceaseless iteration were heard above the sighing wind, which now sounded ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... a low, peculiar chirp, not very fierce, but bantering and confident. They quickly come to blows, but it is a very fantastic battle, and, as it would seem, indulged in more to satisfy their sense of honor than to hurt each ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Whilst we with happy hearts our circuit keep, The gladness of the Earth is shown. She smileth, though the trickling raindrops weep Silently o'er her, one by one. She loves to feel the tears upon her cheek, Like a rich veil, with pearls inwove. Joyous she listens when the swallows chirp, And warbles to her mate, the dove. Blithe as a maiden midst the young green leaves, A wreath she'll wind, a fragrant treasure; All living things in graceful motion leap, As dancing to some merry measure. The morning breezes rustle cordially, Love's thirst ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... kept up ventriloquistic clamor, and from far off the bawling of great bulls and the bleating of the calves brought news of a huge herd of cattle, but these sounds only made his solitary vigil the more impressive. The sleepy chirp of the crickets and the sound of his horse nipping the grass, calmly careless of the wolves, were the only aids to sleep; all else had the effect to keep his tense nerves vibrating. As the cold intensified, the crickets ceased to cry, and the pony, having filled his ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... of the cricket says that the pitch of the song varies with the temperature. He has even worked out a formula by which one can tell the pitch of the chirp, if he knows the temperature, or, knowing the temperature, can determine the pitch. Of course this is too mechanical; yet it indicates that there must be considerable relation between the two; the warmer the cricket the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... see him. I tell you, Robinson Crusoe don't make near enough of his loneliness. But here was interesting company. He looked at me and winked his eye from the front backwards, like a hen, and gave a chirp and began to peck about at once, as though being hatched three hundred years too late was just nothing. 'Glad to see you, Man Friday!' says I, for I had naturally settled he was to be called Man Friday if ever ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... bonnets represented the fashions of ten years past, and the aprons were too often frayed and darned, and relics of some former, more opulent owners. There were multitudes of children, but they were without the gambols which characterize the young of all animals; and there was not even the chirp of a winter bird about them; their faces were prematurely aged and hardened, and their bold eyes revealed that sin had no surprises for them. And every one of these showed that intense look which marks the awful struggle for food and life upon which they had ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... do so. For at this juncture, as had so often happened when this girl and I were closeted, the conversation once more went blue on us. The night breeze whispered, but not the Bassett. A bird twittered, but not so much as a chirp escaped Bertram. It was perfectly amazing, the way her mere presence seemed to wipe speech from my lips—and mine, for that matter, from hers. It began to look as if our married life together would be rather like twenty ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... treated them with her birds' canary and hemp seed. Robbie gave them bits of his cookies and cakes. Anything that the children liked to eat, these little chickens liked also; and when they heard the little boots coming towards them they would perch on the edge of their yard and chirp and peep and coax for ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... approach his home, What time, 'mid western mists, the broad, red sun, Sinking, calls out from heaven the earliest star; And the crisp blazing of the dry Yule-log Flickers upon the pictured walls, and lights By fits the unshutter'd lattice; but, in vain, Thy chirp repeated earnestly; the flap, Against the obdurate pane, of thy small wing;— He hears thee not—he heeds not—but, at morn, The ice-enamoured schoolboy, early afoot, Finds thy small bulk beneath the alder stump, Thy bright eyes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... a horse of mighty pow'r, Compact in frame, and strong of limb; Went with a chirp from hour to hour; Whip-cord! 'twas ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... slight sounds, unnoticed before, are heard; the ticking of the clock, the chirp of a sparrow in the garden, the flight of a butterfly. The world becomes full of imperceptible sounds which invade that deep silence without disturbing it, just as the stars shine out in the dark sky without banishing the darkness of the night. It is almost the discovery of a new world where there ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... on I rambled to the west, Below the zunny hangen's breast, Where, down athirt the little stream, The brudge's beam did lie at rest: But all the birds, wi' lively glee, Did chirp an' hop vrom tree to tree, As if it wer vrom pride, to zee Goo by the ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... before the old horse was caught and brought back into bondage. After that Virginia took long drives with her father, and coming home, they would sit in the summer house high above the Merimec, listening to the crickets' chirp, and watching the day fade upon the water. The Colonel, who had always detested pipes, learned to smoke a corncob. He would sit by the hour, with his feet on the rail of the porch and his hat tilted back, while Virginia read to him. Poe and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... visiting. The simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history! His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London—the site of old theatres, churches, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... chanting monotones fainted and died in the portals of her ears like a nurse's song, while her sinking eyelids shut not out, but in, one tallish Rosemont senior who had risen in prayer visibly heavy with the sleep he had robbed from three successive nights. The chirp of a lone cricket somewhere under the floor led her forth in a half dream beyond the town and the gleaming turnpike, across wide fields whose multitudinous, tiny life rasped and buzzed under the vibrant heat; and so on to Rosemont, dear Rosemont, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... time to squeeze out a single tear a sound broke the stillness, making her prick up her ears. It was only the soft twitter of a bird, but it seemed to be a peculiarly gifted bird, for while she listened the soft twitter changed to a lively whistle, then a trill, a coo, a chirp, and ended in a musical mixture of all the notes, as if the bird burst out laughing. Rose laughed also, and, forgetting her woes, jumped ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... insects whispered in his ear mysterious words. Here a shrill chirp; there a click, like the click made with the tongue; further on, plaintive murmurs; in the distance a tinkle like that of the bell on the neck of the wandering ox. Suddenly Rey heard a strange sound, a rapid note, that ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... her from Whitford under her pillow, and she kept spreading them out, and making us read them, and—oh! their braveness and cheeriness—they did quite seem to hold one up! And then poor little Minna's constant little robin-chirp of faith, "God will not let them hurt him." One could not bear to tell the child, that though indeed they cannot hurt him, it may not be in her sense! Look here! These are her slippers. She has worked on all day to finish them, that they might be done and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one—him that confesses to Father Van Sandt." Dolan shook his head sadly and sighed. "He's a black-hearted wretch. If you want to see how a soul will look in its underwear, get an Irishman to confess to a Dutchman." The chirp of crickets arose in the silence, and after a time Dolan concluded, "And now there abideth these three, me that I shave, me that they vote against, and me that the Father knows; and the greatest of ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... sowes his herbs, his flowers & roots And carefully manures his trees of fruits. The Pleiades their influence now give, And all that seemed as dead afresh doth live. The croaking frogs, whom nipping winter kil'd Like birds now chirp, and hop about the field, The Nightingale, the black-bird and the Thrush Now tune their layes, on sprayes ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... are fond of bathing, and after a rain may be seen in crowds fluttering and splashing in the pools of water in the street. The cold winter does not molest them. They continue as plump and jolly and independent as ever, and chirp and hop about as merrily on a snowy day as ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... she was choked by her sobs. The whole valley was deserted and silent in the dazzling light, and the overwhelming heat, and only the grasshoppers uttered their shrill, continuous chirp among the sparse, yellow grass on both sides of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... rise opposite to my window there are many sparrows which have also made their homes. In the morning, before the sun has arisen, and at the time when the dawn is making the city gray and leaden in color instead of somber and black, these sparrows begin to chatter and chirp and sing in discordant notes, and by this I know the day has come. Upon this morning it seemed to me the sparrows chattered with an unusual commotion; and as I listened I heard from another window near mine the voice of grief and lamentation. Then I knew that one who had long been sick ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... and peacefully in Sister Lizzie's bed, and looked so pretty in her sleep that Abby came three times to wake her, and three times went away again, unable to spoil so perfect a picture. At last, however, the dark eyes opened of their own accord, and Marie began to chirp and twitter, like a bird at daybreak in its nest; only instead of daybreak, it was eight o'clock in the morning, a most shocking hour for anybody to be getting up. But Abby had been in the habit of spoiling her sister, who had a theory that she was never able to do anything early in the ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... as they could and hurried out of doors. The sun was just rising and the sky was a beautiful red and gold. The dew sparkled on the grass, and in the tree tops the birds were just beginning to chirp and call. ...
— Five Little Friends • Sherred Willcox Adams
... see us happie; it may tend to make him soe. Let him and his abide with us, at the leaste, till the Spring; his Lads will studdy and play with mine, your Mother will help you in your Housewiferie, the two olde Men will chirp together beside the Christmasse Hearth; and, if I find thy Weeklie Bills the heavier 'twill be but to write another Book, and make a better Bargain for it than I did for the last. We will use Hospitalitie without grudging; and, as for your owne Increase of ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... twain were lodged in Wai-pi'o, Beheld Hi'i-lawe, the grand. We brought and cut for our love-wreath The rich hala drupe from Naue's strand, 5 Tufted lehua that waves on the cliff; Then sat and gave ear to song of o-o, Or harked the chirp of the tree-shell. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the girl poured out her thanks, Marianna heard a faint "chirp, chirp," and looking down, beheld a little yellow bird crouching on the hearthstone. Every now and then he hid his head under his wings and cried unhappily. It was the yellow bird which had brought the message from the Emperor of ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... do," said the poor little brown bird; "and I did not know how to make a fine nest such as those in the hedges. Oh, my pretty eggs!—my heart aches for them! I shall never hear my little nestlings chirp!" ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... tired ants tug At a heavy slug, With my rye-beard lance I'd push it along, And they'd think, "All at once we are wondrous strong!" In the nest of the robin, under the eaves Of the apple-leaves, I'd drop a worm in the gaping throats That answer my chirp of the mother's notes. When bonny Miss Harebell thirsts in vain For a drop of rain, I would fill at the brook my shining cap, And lay it all dripping in ...
— The Nursery, No. 165. September, 1880, Vol. 28 - A Monthly Magazine For Youngest Readers • Various
... Fanny used to call the nestling "The Little Foundling," and so did their mamma, but Fanny and Charles also gave him the name of "Chirp." Poor little Chirp's feet did not get well. He still continued quite lame, as the bones of his claws had all been injured severely. In other respects he was very well; ate his food with a great appetite, and seemed contented and happy. His lantern ...
— The Goat and Her Kid • Harriet Myrtle
... three hundred yards across, but all were clothed with the most beautiful green foliage and shrubbery. As the pale yellow of the eastern sky began to grow red, ducks and gulls bestirred themselves. Early risers among them first began to chirp, and scream, and whistle their morning song,—for there are lazy ones among the birds, just as there are among men. Sometimes, when the canoe rounded a point of rocks a flock of geese were found floating peacefully among the sedges, ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... years ago a beautiful little brown sparrow made her home in the garden of a certain great and renowned magician. She built her nest in the grass, and was content to hop and chirp about in the rose thicket, and to keep very near ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... was broken by infant wails and visions of a phantom figure pacing noiselessly to and fro in the watches of the night. His meals were interrupted by the frequent flight of the presiding genius, who deserted him, half-helped, if a muffled chirp sounded from the nest above. And when he read his paper of an evening, Demi's colic got into the shipping list and Daisy's fall affected the price of stocks, for Mrs. Brooke was only interested in ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... the chirping of the cricket says that the pitch of the song varies with the temperature. He has even worked out a formula by which one can tell the pitch of the chirp, if he knows the temperature, or, knowing the temperature, can determine the pitch. Of course this is too mechanical; yet it indicates that there must be considerable relation between the two; the warmer the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the budding spray, I hear the clarion tones of chanticleer, And robins chirp about from break of day,— All pipe their carols ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... shadows, thrown by the tall, green plane trees, crept over the stones. Somewhere near a bird sang; its note was clear and bold. Its silvery trill seemed to melt into the air that was full of the soft, caressing splash of the waves. The silence that followed was broken by the nervous chirp of ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... night passed, thick with recollections and regrets, deepening into a horror of loss and darkness, and then slowly brightening into the calm prelude of a day of farewell. The birds began to chirp and twitter in the ivy; the thrush uttered her long-drawn notes, sweetly repeated and sustained in the dusky bushes. That sound was much connected in my mind with Aveley. To be awakened thus in the summer dawn, to listen awhile to the delicious sound, to fall asleep again ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the horses, to take advantage of the protection afforded by the fires against any prowling bear or active leopard. Perfect silence never reigns in these grand solitudes. Near us I could hear the incessant metallic chirp of the hyla, the shrill call and reply of the tree cricket, and the hum of myriads of insects of every description, while from a distance resounded the hoarse voices of thousands of tank frogs, which kept up a spirited ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... kite was still flying high, no bird was to be seen as far as the eye could reach from Castra Regis. But there followed in turn what proved even a worse evil. All the birds were cowed; their sounds stopped. Neither song nor chirp was heard—silence seemed to have taken the place of the normal voices of bird life. But that was not all. The silence spread ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... Sometimes I warble and chirp at the same time. Then it sounds like two birds singing. My tongue is short and thick, and this helps me to talk. But I have been talking too much. My ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... another, now and then, as they exchanged a syllable or two, and there was a mild luminousness of pleasure in the recesses of their pale-blue eyes. The evening darkened fast into night. The plaintive half-chirp, half-whistle of a tree-toad fell in monotonous repetition ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... the next morning, the robin in the nest above Mary's window stretched out his left wing, opened one eye, and gave a short and rather drowsy chirp, which broke up his night's rest and restored him to the full consciousness that he was a bird with wings and feathers, with a large apple-tree to live in, and all heaven for an estate,—and so, on these fortunate premises, he broke into a gush of singing, clear and loud, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... quite died down, leaving a suffocation in the air that is difficult to explain; but I've felt something like it on a sultry summer day when the sky is black with slowly advancing clouds, when the birds have become too awed to chirp and every leaf in the trees hangs motionless. It is in these suspenses of unpleasant expectation, when at any moment the heavens will open with a hissing smash of fire and nature be turned to fury, that one breathes heavily. There is no other feeling like it, except the ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... perennial heat and moisture occur in abundance, spread overhead in such extraordinary luxuriance that few of the sun's rays could penetrate the massy net-work of leaves and branches forming the roof of our fairy passage. Not a single bird could be seen, either seated or on the wing; nor was even a chirp distinguishable above the dreamy hum of millions of mosquitoes floating about, in a calm so profound, that it seemed as if the surface of the water had never been disturbed since the Creation. The air, though ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... mice squeaking in the walls. The night was interminably long, yet she prayed to hold back the dawn. What would another day bring forth? The blackness of her room seemed blacker for the sad, entering gray of morning light. She heard the chirp of awakening birds, and fancied she caught a faint clatter of hoofs. Then low, dull distant, throbbed a heavy gunshot. She had expected it, was waiting for it; nevertheless, an electric shock checked her heart, froze the very living ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... one and all, Crowd around her at her call! One chick, missing, peeps to say: "Chirp, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... passed, and George came close behind them. And around him Roger saw, emerging from the semi-dark, faces turning like his own to the summits of the mountains and the billowy splendors there. It grew so dark he could see no more. There fell a deep silence, not a sound but the occasional chirp of a bird or the faint whirr of an insect. Even the glow on the peaks was gone. Darkness, ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... one was Father Chirp; Here was his early home; Here lived his mother And dearest brother, And hither ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... yesterday, was again seen to-day. I remember shooting the same species at elevations of 8,000 feet in Bootan, in oak forests. It has the habits of Merops, with its voice or chirp, and is very gregarious, so that one part of the flock will not separate from the rest. It perches in a very erect manner making swoops and sallies after insects precisely as Merops. Plumage sombre, general ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... very white and cold, and underneath her breath she kept crying, "Oh, will they never come—will they never come?" and a cricket somewhere about the house began to chirp. ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... the myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms. We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose every ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... sunset and see into the streets of heaven. He is dressed in black, and is rather more clerical in appearance than most English curates are nowadays; but he does not wear the collar and waistcoat of a parish priest. He is roused from his trance by the chirp of an insect from a tuft of grass in a crevice of the stone. His face relaxes: he turns quietly, and gravely takes off his hat to the tuft, addressing the insect in a brogue which is the jocular assumption of a gentleman and not the natural ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... a wee little mite Of a cricket went chirping by day and by night; And further down, still, a cunning blue mouse In a snug little nook of that strawstack kept house! When the cricket went "chirp," Miss Mousie would squeak "Come in," and a blush would enkindle her cheek! She thought—silly girl! 't was a beau come to woo, But I guess it was only ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... louder and more loud; the cricket's measured chirp seemed to grow more painfully audible; the wind whistled through the leafless boughs without, and in the lulls of the abating storm the low rumble of the ghyll could be heard within. What kept Ralph away? It was no unusual ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... ground. But even he shares the common feeling, and stretches himself to his full height with an earnestness which is almost laughable, in view of the result; for his notes are hardly louder than a cricket's chirp. Probably he has fallen into this lowly habit from living in meadows and salt marshes, where bushes and trees are not readily to be come at; and it is worth noticing that, in the case of the skylark and the white-winged blackbird, the same conditions have led ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... caroll'd till peep of the dawn, The Lark gently hinted 'twas time to be gone; And his clarion, so shrill, gave the company warning, That Chanticleer scented the gales of the morning, So they chirp'd in full chorus, a friendly adieu; And, with hearts beating light as the plumage that grew On their merry-thought bosoms, away they ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... and so you find him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because he harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work, and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would be happier, and—who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I no longer,' little Mary Samm made answer firmly. 'I love my sisters dearly, dearly,' she raised her voice unconsciously as she spoke, and a chaffinch on a branch overhead filled in the pause with an answering chirp, 'I love my mother too. Didst thou really say thou wert expecting her to visit thee right soon? My dear, dear mother! But I love my dear grandfather best of all, for he hath nobody but me to care for him. At least, of course, he hath thee, Aunt Joan,' she ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... and fresh, and still; Alone the chirp of flitting bird, And talk of children on the hill, And bell of wandering ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... that he was out we left open the door of the room where he was. When we remembered the bird we were much afraid lest he should have flown out of the room. We hunted high and low, calling his name, "Carmen," to which he often answers with a chirp. At last I happened to push aside a little low stool, and there, crouching down so as not to be found (as he dislikes being put into his cage) was Carmen. He has tried since then to hide; but we know his tricks, so ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... pictured him sitting on a fine, red-painted reaper, cracking his whip over the horses, and mowing down the thick, waving grass, as a war hero mows down his enemies. And as he stepped into the office he seemed to hear the clicking noise of the reaper, the soft swish of falling grass and the shrill chirp and light flutter of frightened ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... under tons of water, and the whir of the screw in mid-air. The captain glanced at the barometer, drew his body to its full height, reached for his storm-coat, slipped it on, and was about to swing back the door opening on the deck, when the chirp of a canary rang through the room. At the sound he turned quickly and walked back ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... prolonged to nigh the limits of endurance, so that genial ideas and softening influences seem to have become things of the long-forgotten past, and then try to imagine a change, compared to which all the transformation scenes of all the pantomimes that ever blazed are as a tomtit's chirp to a lion's roar, or a—a—Words fail again! ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... The morning skies were gray monotones, and the evening gorgeous reds. The birds had finished their summer singing. Sometimes the alert chirp of the cardinal suddenly smote the ear from some neighboring tree; but he would pass, a flash of crimson, from one garden to the next, and with another chirp or two be gone for days. The nervy, unmusical waking cry of the mocking-bird was often the first ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... sings the latest, Where the hawthorn blooms the sweetest, Where the nestlings chirp and flee, That's the ...
— Story Hour Readers Book Three • Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie
... late in Autumn, when other trees shed theirs, and drooping in the effort, lingers on all crackled and smoke-dried till the following season, when it repeats the same process; and perhaps, if the weather be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirp in its branches." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... is come!—the summer is come! With its flowers and its branches green, Where the young birds chirp on the blossoming boughs, And the sunlight struggles between: And, like children, over the earth and sky The flowers and the light clouds play; But never before to my heart or eye Came there ever so sweet a May As this— ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... There could not run the smallest breath of wind But all the quarter sounded like a wood; And in the chequered silence and above The hum of city cabs that sought the Bois, Suburban ashes shivered into song. A patter and a chatter and a chirp And a long dying hiss - it was as though Starched old brocaded dames through all the house Had trailed a strident skirt, or the whole sky Even in a ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speech of the bird with a peculiar whistling sound in his throat, that was a marvelous imitation of a sparrow's chirp, and the little boy clapped his hands with delight, ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... Barry and his crew spent up the river, waiting for the moon; and the mysterious night noises from the shore were lulling and drowsy. Gradually the schooner blurred into a vague mass of shadow, out of which the two lights twinkled uncertainly. And mingling with the chirp of insects and the fitful cries of dreaming monkeys came a gnawing and rasping of wood that seemed to echo throughout ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... terror! Only think of so composite a phenomenon as Mrs. Walters, for instance, adorned with limp nightcap and stiff curl-papers, like garnishes around a leg of roast mutton, waking up beside me at four o'clock in the morning as some gray-headed love-bird of Madagascar, and beginning to chirp and ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... see the gleam of a red garment, and then find a man of the roads, with dusky wife and child. You speak one word, "Sarishan!" and you are introduced. These people are like birds and bees, they belong to out-of-doors and nature. If you can chirp or buzz a little in their language and know their ways, you will find out, as you sit in the forest, why he who loves green bushes and mossy rocks is glad to fly from cities, and likes to be free of the joyous citizenship of the roads, and everywhere ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Iago at the stage door with a brick You have missed the moral of the play. He will have a midnight supper with Othello and his wife. They will chirp together and be gay. But the things Iago stands for must go down into the dust: Lying and suspicion and conspiracy and lust. And I cannot hate the Kaiser (I hope you understand.) Yet I chase the thing he stands for with a brickbat in ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... decorum. When they gaily had caroll'd till peep of the dawn, The Lark gently hinted, 'twas time to be gone; And his clarion, so shrill, gave the company warning, That Chanticleer scented the gales of the morning. So they chirp'd, in full chorus, a friendly adieu; And, with hearts beating light as the plumage that grew On their merry-thought bosoms, away ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... The egg, when laid, by warmth is made a chicken, And Christ, by grace, those dead in sin doth quicken. The egg, when first a chick, the shell's its prison; So's flesh to the soul, who yet with Christ is risen. The shell doth crack, the chick doth chirp and peep, The flesh decays, as men do pray and weep. The shell doth break, the chick's at liberty, The flesh falls off, the soul mounts up on high But both do not enjoy the self-same plight; The soul is safe, the chick ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... laughing down the sky To see her buds all busy hatching; With tender green the woods are gay, And birds, as is their April way, Chirp merrily on the bough, and I Chirp, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... was to be there. For the first time Fern's gentle nature felt jarred and out of tune. The bright little fire had burned hollow; there was a faint clinging mist from the fog outside; the cricket had ceased to chirp. Fern glanced round her disconsolately; how poor and shabby it must look to him, she thought, after the rooms at ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... impatiently for the light to come so that he could rise to another day. He learned all the sounds of the late night and early morning, and how they had different voices in the dark; the faint whisper of the maple-branches, the occasional stir and muffled chirp of a bird, the hushed, secret murmur of the little brook which ran between his garden and the Crittenden yard, and the distant, deeper note of the Necronsett River as it rolled down the Ashley valley to The Notch. He could almost tell, without opening his eyes, when the sky grew light over ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... lonesome cell, Where never romping playmates come, Nor bashful sweethearts, cunning-dumb— An April burst of girls and boys, Their rainbowed cloud of glooms and joys Born with their songs, gone with their toys; Nor ever is its stillness stirred By purr of cat, or chirp of bird, Or mother's twilight legend, told Of Horner's pie, or Tiddler's gold, Or fairy hobbling to the door, Red-cloaked and weird, banned and poor, To bless the good child's gracious eyes, The good child's wistful charities, And ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the brookside, I wandered by the mill; I could not hear the brook flow, The noisy wheel was still, There was no burr of grasshopper No chirp of any bird, But the beating of my own heart Was all the sound ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... at Peter Kenny's door, his diffident fingers evoked from the bell but a single chirp—a sound that would by no means have gained him admission had Peter not been sitting up in bed, reading to while away ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... to worry us more and more. A certain harmless singer of the cricket or perhaps of the tree-toad variety used to chirp his innocent note a short distance from our cabin. For all I know he had done so from the moment of our installation, but I had never noticed him before. Now I caught myself listening for his irregular recurrence ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... into the cage, seized the little canary- bird with the red ribbon, and squeezed him so closely that the poor little creature gave one faint chirp and died. The man drew him out, and hurled him against the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... that night and the day, awaiting a piteous death. But apart the maidens huddled together lamented beside the daughter of Aeetes. And as when, forsaken by their mother, unfledged birds that have fallen from a cleft in the rock chirp shrilly; or when by the banks of fair-flowing Pactolus, swans raise their song, and all around the dewy meadow echoes and the river's fair stream; so these maidens, laying in the dust their golden hair, all through ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... blank walls before my windows. On the side of the street a pug dog has been barking for an hour, a parrot screaming, and a parroqueet imitating the chirp of sparrows. On the side of the yard the washerwomen are singing, and another parroqueet cries incessantly, 'Shoulder arrms!' How long ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... with extreme caution, for the colour of their soft feathers is scarcely distinguishable from the ground which they have selected as a table for their morning meal. Nicasio is in advance of me, tracking a company of guinea-fowls, whose melodious chirp has caught his accustomed ear. They are not yet visible, but my sporting friend has halted behind a bush, and thrown away his white tell-tale panama. This means mischief. The dark-grey clothes and sun-burnt face of my companion blend naturally with the surroundings, and, as he crouches ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... tried to laugh. "Ef it ain't the dicky-bird!" The bird looked at him. "Ef that doesn't beat—" but he could not think what it "beat." The bird cocked its head. "Ain't ye afeard o' me?" It gave a feeble chirp. "Well, I'm damned!" said the man, and after this mild expression of his feelings, forgot to curse again. He even began to eye the island with a vague questioning wonder, as if asking himself what means might be thought of that would enable him to reach it; but the ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... me that the pitcher has the best chance to do the little turn I want done, and that's why I've come to you. Now, don't go off half-cocked! Hold hard, and hear me chirp. Every young fellow at college needs money, and they need a right good bit of it, too. I don't allow that you are any exception. Now, I reckon I can show you how you can make a smart bit of a pile and do it dead easy. Nobody but you ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... head seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others. Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they call on the host of stars, And the cold and dimly shining moon, And the spirits, that watch by night in the air, Or chirp in the hollow oak[E], to see The plighting of their hands: They married themselves, And man and wife ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... fence he didn't turn aside toward the road, but climbed over and found an open space on the side of the little hill under the trees, and threw himself down there to smoke his pipe and stare back across the meadow. It was very still in the woods, with only the sleepy chirp of a bird or rustling of a squirrel to be heard, but from somewhere in the hot glare of the afternoon came the rasping of ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... leg, And laid it down like a cribbage-peg, For the Rout was done and the riot: The Square was hush'd; not a sound was heard; The sky was gray, and no creature stirr'd, Except one little precocious bird, That chirp'd—and ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... father some books to read, and some papers, and father said he was more comfortable than downstairs, as I did not mind his pipe, and Tom has hung my linnet there,' pointing to the window, 'and if you open the cage, miss, you will see him hop all over the bedclothes, and chirp in the ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... tell me no one had been here? (Shakes his finger at her.) My little song-bird must never do that again. A song-bird must have a clean beak to chirp with—no false notes! (Puts his arm round her waist.) That is so, isn't it? Yes, I am sure it is. (Lets her go.) We will say no more about it. (Sits down by the stove.) How warm and snug it is here! (Turns ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... white, profusely spotted with red, and sometimes have also a few spots of purplish grey. On the 15th June I found a nest with four young ones on the south side of the Pir-Pinjal Pass. This bird has no song, only a double chirp in addition to its callnote. The double chirp, which is very loud, is intended for a song, for the male bird incessantly repeats it as he feeds from tree to tree near where the female is sitting upon ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... the birds once more begin to chirp and trill, they salute the setting sun and fly away to rest. Then the monkeys commence their screeching and chattering and soon after the owls and other night birds take their turn, making the now dense darkness more terrible with their harsh, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... dragging his medals away from him, "that's the answer, You for the Burbs! You for the chateau up the track! Henceforth, you for the cage in the country where the daffydowndillys sing in the treetops and buttercups chirp from bough ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... you, little mother. Don't be afraid," whispered the child; and, as if it understood, the bird settled down on her nest with a comfortable chirp, while its mate hopped up to give her a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... They might chirp and chaffer, come and go For pleasure or profit, her men alive— My business was hardly with them, I trow, 35 But with empty cells of the human hive— With the chapter-room, the cloister-porch, The church's apsis, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... rock beside the shining things it coveted, it dropped dried and shriveled fruit. Dalgard's fingers separated two of the gleaming marbles, rolled them toward the animal, who scooped them up with a chirp of delight. But it did not leave. Instead it peered intently at the rest of the beads. Hoppers had their own form of intelligence, though it might not compare with that of humans. And this one was enterprising. In the end it delivered ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... has scales, overlapping each other as the slates on the roof of a house do, thus making a perfectly waterproof coat for its whole body; the bird has legs and wings, and the fish has neither; the bird can chirp and sing, while fishes generally make ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... the birds are singing Low, as thou passest, where in leaves they lie; With timid chirp unto their soft mates clinging, They greet that presence without which they die,— Die, even with Nature's universal heart, When thou, her queen, dost in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... stealing Rows of little socks to fill? Are they angels floating hither With their message of good-will? What sweet spell are these elves weaving, As like larks they chirp and sing? Are these palms of peace from heaven ...
— Christmas Sunshine • Various
... curve of the fragment of wing also suggested its probable size when unbroken. It was perhaps two inches long. As there are little horny rings round the wing base like those which crickets have, on which they rub their legs and so "chirp," it is also quite likely that this insect of hoary antiquity did the same, and enlivened the silence of Devonian fern groves with a prehistoric hum. It is quite in keeping with modern ideas that in that age of fishes one of the most remarkable insects should have been a kind of May-fly, "a large ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... brain—plays, novels, essays, tales, homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and poetics, politics and rhetorics, will I display no more mercy than sundry commentators of maltreated Aristotle: I will exhibit them in their state chaotic; I will addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not chirp; I will reveal, and secrets shall not waste me; I will write, and thoughts shall not batten ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of homelessness about the whole region. Not a bird was flying in the air, no cattle were grazing in the fields, even the merry chirp of the crickets was no longer to be heard in the wayside ditches. The road itself was overgrown with grass on both sides, scarce leaving room for a little winding ribbon of a track in the centre, and even there the ruts, which the last luckless cart ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... blood-poisoning, which might cause death without the assistance of any particular toxic venom. The rattlesnake, however, which is rather too common in the desert, is a different sort of a chap. If he strikes you, you may just as well make your will, and chirp your death song, as to monkey with physicians, and squander some of the good wealth which may be useful to ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... been of chief concern to him, and even before he had begun his medical studies, he had occasionally written poems that won a good deal of praise from friends, but brought no widespread notice. From his very earliest years he could feel very keenly and remember the melody of verse. "The low, soft chirp of the little bird heard in the nest, while his mother is brooding over him," he has written, "lives in his memory, I doubt not, through all the noisy carols of the singing season; so I remember the little songs my mother sang to me when I ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... is at its full. Not another boat is to be seen. The moonlight glimmers on the ripples. Solitude reigns on the banks. The distant village sleeps, nestling within a thick fringe of trees. The shrill, sustained chirp of the cicadas is ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... conversation in the adjoining rooms died away. Once or twice after quiet descended, a little voice spoke out like the chirp of a drowsy bird, brooded over by mother wings. Persis went softly down the stairs. Joel waited long enough to make his advent impressive ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... country was alive with musicians, each one giving out his own notes without any regard for the others, but apparently the score had been written for them all, since the innumerable strains made one divine harmony. From the full-orbed song from the maple by my window, down to the faintest chirp and twitter, there was no discord; while from the fields beyond the village the whistle of the meadow-larks was so mellowed and softened by distance as to incline one to wonder whether their notes were real or mere ideals ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... and wae, on yon snaw-cover'd thorn, Mournfu' and lane is the chirp o' the Robin, He looks through the storm, but nae shelter can see; Come, Robin, and join the sad concert wi' me. Oh, lang may I look o'er yon foam-crested billow, And Hope dies away like a storm-broken willow; Sweet Robin, the blossom again ye may see, But ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... me dark and dismal. With night came new voices—the hideous voices of the nocturnal swamp; the qua-qua of the night-heron, the screech of the swamp-owl, the cry of the bittern, the cl-l-uk of the great water-toad, the tinkling of the bell-frog, and the chirp of the savanna-cricket—all fell upon my ear. Sounds still harsher and more, hideous were heard around me—the plashing of the alligator, and the roaring of his voice; these reminded me that I must not go to sleep. To sleep! I durst not have slept for a single ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... father and Ethel, whose voices he heard in low conversation on the front porch. They ceased for a moment, as though the speakers had heard the sound of his footsteps, and paused to listen. The night was still, so still that the chirp of a cricket under the piazza sounded loudly. It was a cheerful little note, and Donald hated it for its cheer, and started hastily away toward ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass. 'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was mysteriously white out of doors, with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp. 'I'll go down into the coppice,' he thought. He ran down through the fields, reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice. Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Sparrow would chirp truculently, "you 'tend to your business, and let me 'tend to mine. Anybody would think that we were all to save ourselves in this house but you. As for my typing, it's funny if I can't save you something on those miserable ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... I must not let stray sorrows out; They are ill to fledge, and if they feel blithe air They wail and chirp untunefully. Would God I had been a man! when I was born, men say, My father turned his face and wept to think ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in the room. The mother did not utter a word, nor did the son. The birds were twittering outside, even the faintest chirp could be heard as well as the soft rustling of the spring wind in the ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... towards one another, now and then, as they exchanged a syllable or two, and there was a mild luminousness of pleasure in the recesses of their pale-blue eyes. The evening darkened fast into night. The plaintive half-chirp, half-whistle of a tree-toad fell in monotonous repetition ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... leaving a suffocation in the air that is difficult to explain; but I've felt something like it on a sultry summer day when the sky is black with slowly advancing clouds, when the birds have become too awed to chirp and every leaf in the trees hangs motionless. It is in these suspenses of unpleasant expectation, when at any moment the heavens will open with a hissing smash of fire and nature be turned to fury, ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... gently that it did not frighten the rabbit, although he flirted his ears a little when he heard the "click, click!" Everything was so quiet that he probably thought he heard some insect, probably a young or ignorant cricket that did not know how to chirp properly. ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... lamentable story, had it only been gifted with human language. And when he attempted to drive it away, the bird flew no farther than the bough of the next tree, and again came fluttering about his head, with its doleful chirp, as soon as he showed a ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... inspect whether her little brood was safe, she disappeared again. In a few minutes more, she returned, skimming round to reconnoitre that all was safe, she perched upon the nest. Instantly the little nestlings were awake to the summons of her touch and chirp, and, opening their mouths wide, were ready for what she would give. She dropt a small fly into the mouth of one of them, and, having no more, flew away to provide for the other hungry mouths as fast as she could. As soon as she was gone, ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... Not much moonlight could come through, but the leaves would glimmer white in the wind at times. The tree was full of giant birds. Every now and then, one would sweep through, with a great noise. But, except an occasional chirp, sounding like a shrill pipe in a great organ, they made no noise. All at once an owl began to hoot. He thought he was singing. As soon as he began, other birds replied, making rare game of him. To their astonishment, the children found they could understand every word they sang. And ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... sandpiper will run along the stones before you, crying, "wet-feet, wet-feet!" and bowing and teetering in the friendliest manner, as if to show you the way to the best pools. In the thick branches of the hemlocks that stretch across the stream, the tiny warblers, dressed in a hundred colours, chirp and twitter confidingly above your head; and the Maryland yellow-throat, flitting through the bushes like a little gleam of sunlight, calls "witchery, witchery, witchery!" That plaintive, forsaken, persistent note, never ceasing, even in the noonday ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... sultry summer night, silent and still, not a leaf stirring, hardly so much as the chirp of an insect to be heard. The moon looked down from a cloudless sky upon green lawns and meadows, fields and forests clothed in richest verdure; gardens, where bloomed lovely flowers in the greatest variety and profusion, filling the air in their immediate vicinity ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... and naturally stern lineaments with a bright gleam of human feeling, "Chingachgook heard the laugh of Wah-ta-Wah, and knew it from the laugh of the women of the Iroquois. It sounded in his ears, like the chirp ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... and showers, Oh! girlish thorns and flowers, Oh! fruitless days and hours, Oh! groundless hopes and fears: The birds still chirp and twitter, And still the sunbeams glitter: Oh! barren years and bitter, Oh! ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Musick went with us both all the Wood thro', The Lark, Linnet, Throstle, and Nightingale too; Winds over us whisper'd, Flocks by us did bleat, And chirp went the Grasshopper under our Feet. But now she is absent, tho' still they sing on, The Woods are but lonely, the Melody's gone: Her Voice in the Consort, as now I have found, Gave ev'ry thing else ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... bottom of the tunnel was excavated quite to the bark. With my thumb I broke in the thin wall, and the young, which were full-fledged, looked out upon the world for the first time. Presently one of them, with a significant chirp, as much as to say, "It is time we were out of this," began to climb up toward the proper entrance. Placing himself in the hole, he looked around without manifesting any surprise at the grand scene that lay spread ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... rule is the savanna sparrow, who sings habitually from the ground. But even he shares the common feeling, and stretches himself to his full height with an earnestness which is almost laughable, in view of the result; for his notes are hardly louder than a cricket's chirp. Probably he has fallen into this lowly habit from living in meadows and salt marshes, where bushes and trees are not readily to be come at; and it is worth noticing that, in the case of the skylark and the white-winged blackbird, the same conditions have led to a result ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... as superlatively absurd. "Where was the object?" I would ask myself. Moreover, it was too late; and I went on dreaming with open eyes, careering on horseback through the savannas, listening at break of day to the prattle of the parrots in the guava-trees, at nightfall to the chirp of the grillos in the cane-fields, or else smoking my cigar, taking my coffee, rocking myself in a hammock,—in short, enjoying all the delights that are the very heart-blood of a guajiro, and out of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... bashful sweethearts, cunning-dumb— An April burst of girls and boys, Their rainbowed cloud of glooms and joys Born with their songs, gone with their toys; Nor ever is its stillness stirred By purr of cat, or chirp of bird, Or mother's twilight legend, told Of Horner's pie, or Tiddler's gold, Or fairy hobbling to the door, Red-cloaked and weird, banned and poor, To bless the good child's gracious eyes, The good child's wistful charities, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... been so careless, that it appeared that what had passed so lately between them had quite gone out of his mind. Nelly tried to forgive and forget, but her spirit was sad and low. Even Content seemed to droop his wing, and would scarcely give even a chirp. ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... the Wise, pluck out their Eyes, To set forth a Book worth a Groat; We Mad-men are quicker, grow Learn'd with good Liquor, And Chirp a Merry note. ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... confusion of the household. It was lucky if the children slept till seven o'clock. Usually, soon after six, a chirp was heard, a voice, an excited chirrup began, announcing the creation of a new day, there was a thudding of quick little feet, and the children were up and about, scampering in their shirts, with pink legs and glistening, flossy hair all clean from the Saturday's night bathing, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... at nightfall, when the sun has sunk under the hills, and the crickets chirp,—"gone." Say it to yourself when the night is far over, and you wake with some sudden start from pleasant dreams,—"gone." Say it to yourself in some country churchyard, where your father, or your mother, sleeps under the blooming violets of spring,—"gone." Say ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... these pleasures began to grow familiar to his friend Nancy. Her papa, one day, presented her with a book of prints, with which she was so much delighted, that Cherry began to lose at least one half of her attention. As usual, he would chirp the moment he saw her, let her be at what distance she would; but Nancy began to take no notice of him, and almost a week had passed, without his receiving either a bit of biscuit, or a fresh supply of chick-weed. He repeated the sweetest and most harmonious ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... excavated quite to the bark. With my thumb I broke the thin wall, and the young, which were full-fledged, looked out upon the world for the first time. Presently one of them, with a significant chirp, as much to say, "It is time we were out of this," began to climb up toward the proper entrance. Placing himself in the hole, he looked around without manifesting any surprise at the grand scene that lay spread out before him. He was taking his bearings, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... to feed my snow-birds with them; and I should be very happy to have you go with me. I know you will enjoy seeing how merrily they hop about and flutter their wings, and seem to chirp out their thanks as they pick up the ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... oldest acquaintance, and it is my dinners that have made him so fat. He moves about among the others like a rich banker. Only hear him! His very chirp has in it something aristocratic and supercilious. He looks upon this crumb-scattering as a duty society owes him, and determines generously to leave for the others all he can not eat up himself. But I think I see a tuft on his ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... is full of debris, now disintegrated into one solid mass, and covered with vegetation. You can lie on the blossoming clover, where the bees hum and the crickets chirp around you, and can look through the arch which frames its own fair picture. In the foreground lies the steep slope overgrown with bayberry and gay with thistle blooms; then the little winding cove with its bordering cliffs; ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... but green and bright In the summer warmth and the mid-day light, There's the hum of the bee and the chirp of the wren, And the dash of the brook from the older glen. There's the sound of the bell from the scattered flock, And the shade of the beach lies cool on the rock, And fresh from the west is the free-wind's breath. There is nothing here ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... hand into the cage, seized the little canary- bird with the red ribbon, and squeezed him so closely that the poor little creature gave one faint chirp and died. The man drew him out, and hurled him against the wall ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... littering the black soil with leaves among which runs a constant querulous hissing and rustling. Also, storks are uttering their snapping cry, sleek rooks cawing, steppe grasshoppers maintaining their tireless chirp, sturdy, well-grown husbandmen uttering shouts like words of command, the threshing-floors of the rolling steppe diffusing a rain of golden chaff, and eddying whirlwinds catching up stray poultry feathers, dried-onion strips, and leaves yellowed with the heat, to send them dancing ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... single tear a sound broke the stillness, making her prick up her ears. It was only the soft twitter of a bird, but it seemed to be a peculiarly gifted bird, for while she listened the soft twitter changed to a lively whistle, then a trill, a coo, a chirp, and ended in a musical mixture of all the notes, as if the bird burst out laughing. Rose laughed also, and, forgetting her ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... mind, as being descriptive of the very opposite of her character, for she was gentle as a lamb, tender in the mouth, playful in her moods, and sensitive to a degree both in body and spirit. No curb was ever needed to restrain Vixen, nor spur to urge her on. A chirp sent an electric thrill through her handsome frame; a "Quiet, Vic!" sufficed to calm her to absolute docility. Any child could have reined her in, and she went with springy elasticity as though her ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... papers, and father said he was more comfortable than downstairs, as I did not mind his pipe, and Tom has hung my linnet there,' pointing to the window, 'and if you open the cage, miss, you will see him hop all over the bedclothes, and chirp in the beautifullest way.' ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... at them, she heard the mother bird chirp, as if she said, "Do not touch my children, little girl, for I ...
— McGuffey's First Eclectic Reader, Revised Edition • William Holmes McGuffey
... Welcome to my lone retreat! Here, secure from every danger, Hop about, and chirp, and eat: Robin! how I envy thee, Happy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... from his horse, lifted her into the saddle, seated himself before her, so that she could cling to him, and then hastened homewards. The moon shone so brightly between the trees that the soldiers could not miss the track. Presently the birds roused up, and began to chirp and twitter in the dawning light. And if the maiden had had time to listen to their warnings, they would have profited her more than the honeyed words of her lover, which were all that reached her ear. ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... fellows, so he caught me up under his arm, and started off to the ball-ground, where most of them were to be found. Matches tried to follow us, but Sim drove her back, and the last I saw of her she was under the table, whimpering. It was a soft little complaining cry she had, almost like the chirp of a sleepy bird, and when she made it her mouth drew up ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... and had visited Tiffany's more often to admire than to purchase. On the contrary, this rather added a dazzle to the music of the Ogdens. And Molly, whose Eastern song had been silent in this strange land, began to chirp it again during the visit that she made at the ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... concede," The poet cried, with glowing cheeks; "The flocks that from their beds of reed Uprising north or southward fly, And flying write upon the sky The biforked letter of the Greeks, As hath been said by Rucellai; All birds that sing or chirp or cry, Even those migratory bands, The minor poets of the air, The plover, peep, and sanderling, That hardly can be said to sing, But pipe along the barren sands,— All these have souls akin to ours; So hath the lovely race of flowers: Thus much I grant, but nothing more. The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Flushed with the morning's ruddy flame; The air was fresh and soft and sweet, The slopes in spring's new verdure lay, And, wet with dewdrops, at my feet Bloomed the young violets of May. No sound of busy life was heard Amid those forests lone and still, Save the faint chirp of early bird, Or bleat of deer along the hill. I traced the rivulet's winding way, New scenes of beauty opened round. Where woody shades of brightest green And lovely blossoms tinged the ground. 'Ah, happy valley stream,' I said, 'Calm glides ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... are thrilling, after their fashion; but the music of modern ordnance and projectile, the beautiful whistle of the minie-ball, the howl of shell that makes unearthly havoc with the air, the whiz-z-z of solid shot, the chirp of bullets, the scream of grape and canister, the yell of immense conical cylinders, that fall like redhot stoves ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... blackbirds meet, And robins pipe amid the cedars nigher. Thro' the still elms I hear the ferry's beat. The swallows chirp about the towering spire; The whole air pulses with its weight of sweet, Yet not quite satisfied is ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of tea and visiting. The simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history! His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London—the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay—where ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... [lamb]; low, moo [cow, cattle]; troat[obs3], croak, peep [frog]; coo [dove, pigeon]; gobble [turkeys]; quack [duck]; honk, gaggle, guggle [obs3][goose]; crow, caw, squawk, screech, [crow]; cackle, cluck, clack [hen, rooster, poultry]; chuck, chuckle; hoot, hoo [owl]; chirp, cheep, chirrup, twitter, cuckoo, warble, trill, tweet, pipe, whistle [small birds]; hum [insects, hummingbird]; buzz [flying insects, bugs]; hiss [snakes, geese]; blatter[obs3]; ratatat [woodpecker]. Adj. crying &c. v.; blatant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Cincirillo follow thee about, Inverting one swart foot suspensively, And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp Of bird above him on the olive-branch? Frighten him then away! 'twas he who slew Our pigeons, our white pigeons peacock-tailed, That feared not you and me—alas, nor him! I flattened his striped sides along ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... definitely made I could do nothing but go on. The weather was clear and warm, with an odorous south wind drawing forth the leaves, and as I fell to work, raking up the yard, the smell of unfolding blooms, the call of exultant "high-holders" and the chirp of cheerful robins brought back with a rush, all the sweet, associated memories of other springs and other gardens, making my gold-seeking expedition seem not only chimerical, but traitorous to ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... that. I don't, nor you needn't, no more than other folk; for the tongue, be it never so bitin', it can't draw blood, mind ye, and hard words break no bones; and I'll make a cup o' tea—ye like a cup o' tea—and we'll take a cup together, and ye'll chirp up a bit, and see how pleasant and ruddy the sun shines on the lake ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... you're a martyr to our long tongues!" cried Patricia, jumping up and putting out the light. "Go to sleep now. We won't chirp a single note. ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... art. True that the hiatus would be slight— insignificant if you will—but the insignificant is sometimes dear to us; and though nightingales, thrushes, and skylarks were to sing in King's Bench Walk, I should miss the individual chirp of ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Ave has all that he has written to her from Whitford under her pillow, and she kept spreading them out, and making us read them, and—oh! their braveness and cheeriness—they did quite seem to hold one up! And then poor little Minna's constant little robin-chirp of faith, "God will not let them hurt him." One could not bear to tell the child, that though indeed they cannot hurt him, it may not be in her sense! Look here! These are her slippers. She has worked on all day to finish ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of squirrels and the chirp and twitter of birds that haunted the lonely place ceased and it was night. Only the notes of fall insects in their monotonous and ceaseless iteration were heard above the sighing wind, which now sounded like a requiem ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... a "shuttle"? What does the word still mean here? Who are the "elfin clan"? By whom is the sheaf tenanted? What is a reveille? Does the grasshopper chirp at night? Why is its cry ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... I with my fellow bird or brute So strangely metamorphis'd, either ney Or bellow loud: or if 't may better sute Chirp out my joy pearch'd upon higher spray. My passions fond with impudence rehearse, Immortalize my madnesse ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... himself for a great effort, and making a start away from the rail managed to drag his slippers as far as the binnacle. There he stopped again, exhausted and bored. From under the lifted glass panes of the cabin skylight near by came the feeble chirp of a canary, which appeared to give him some satisfaction. He listened, smiled faintly muttered "Dicky, poor Dick—" and fell back into the immense silence of the world. His eyes closed, his head hung low over the hot brass of the binnacle top. Suddenly he stood ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... as it comes peeping through the windows of the morning, then see the birds leave their bowers, the larks to fly away to the fields, the mocking-bird to sing in the cedar at the garden gate, the robin to chirp to its mate, and you will see a picture which will pale that of ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... under the elm! The sweet-scented grass was warm with the afternoon sun, and musical with the chirp and hum of its insect homes. The bees fluttered in and out over mamma's rose garden, and all the air was filled with the delicate fragrance ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... this has been a very silent winter," the minister remarked. "In my walks and drives of late I have scarcely heard the chirp of a bird. Are there many that stay with us through ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... began to be strange sounds in the forest. The birds had ceased to sing, save for a chirp now and then as Gigi's passing wakened some tired songster. But there were other noises which Gigi did not understand, and which set his heart to knocking fearfully; the cracking of twigs far off and near at hand; little scurries in the underbrush ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... solemnity about the Roman villa as soon as Marcus was left alone. All seemed to have grown painfully still. It was fancy, no doubt, but, to the boy, the birds had ceased to sing and chirp among the trees, the sounds from the farm were distant, and though more than once Marcus listened intently he did not hear Serge go to or from his room, nor his step ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... conserver is the chipping squirrel, or chipmunk, so named because his cry sounds like the chirp of little chickens. His method of dress is most unusual; he is brownish grey in colour, with five stripes of black and two of pale yellow running along the back of his coat; the throat and lower part of his body is snowy white. ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... each other. She is not at all surprised to hear that the animals used once to talk. The wonder would be if some one told her they don't talk now. She is quite sure she understands what her big dog Tom says and her little canary Chirp. She is quite right; animals have always talked, and they talk still; but they only talk to their friends. Rose Benoit loves them and they love her, and that is why she understands what they say. To understand each other there is ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... butterflies, and the air thick with all those woodland sounds which like instruments in an orchestra combine to play the great symphony of the yearly festival of June. Winds whisper in the birches and sigh among the firs; bees are busy with their irredolent labor among the heather, a myriad birds chirp in the green temples of the forest trees, and the voice of the river prattling over stony places, bubbling into pools, chuckling and gulping round corners, gives you the sense that many presences and companions are near ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... by Breidablik, and the sound follows them all the way from the hills here and there; 'tis no military music like in the towns, nay, but voices—a proclamation: Spring has come. Then suddenly the first chirp of a bird is heard from a treetop, waking others, and a calling and answering on every side; more than a song, it is a hymn of praise. The emigrant feels home-sick already, maybe, something weak and helpless ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... gradually extends its edges along the sides of the shell, as the chick enlarges, but is at the same time applied closer to the internal surface of the shell; when the time of hatching approaches the chick is liable to break this air-bag with its beak, and thence begin to breathe and to chirp; at this time the edges of the enlarged air-bag extend so as to cover internally one hemisphere of the egg; and as one half of the external shell is thus moist, and the other half dry, as soon as the mother hearing the chick chirp, or the chick itself wanting ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... in contrast to the milder colorings. Blackbirds and bluebirds chatter and chipmunks chirp. The gold so hard to find in the mines glares from the skies. The hills cuddle in banks of snowy clouds, and above all a pure clear blue sky sweeps. The lakes and streams abound with rainbow trout, the gamest of any ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... be had missed the sight of a bird, and the sound of their chirp and song! Nebsecht said: "There are some birds—we ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... she warped the moss to form her nest, And modelled it within with wood and clay, And by-and-by, like heath-bells gilt with dew, There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers, Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue; And there I witnessed, in the summer hours, A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly, Glad as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... in vodka. I poured myself out a teacupful and greedily drank it off, for I was intensely thirsty. Axinya had quite recently scrubbed the table and benches, and there was that smell in the kitchen which is found in bright, snug kitchens kept by tidy cooks. And that smell and the chirp of the cricket used to lure us as children into the kitchen, and put us in the mood for hearing fairy tales and playing at "Kings" ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... crowing of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far off, from some farmhouse away among the hills—but it was like a dreaming sound in his ear. No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog from a neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably and turning ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... into her mind as she sat there, apparently enjoying herself; she was wrapped in a secrecy so deep that no human being could touch even the fringe of what she was thinking about, for Winnie's remarks were only like the chirp of a bird on the window-sill ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... can carefully in the center of the coop, she put the little chickens close by it. Finding it soft and warm, they cuddled up against the flannel cover, and began to chirp as contentedly as if it were a mother hen. Then she pinned a square of flannel to the upper side of the can, letting it spread either way like a mother hen's wings, and leaving the ends open for the chickens to ...
— Dew Drops, Vol. 37. No. 16., April 19, 1914 • Various
... full play of my faculties, and without any apprehension of early departure, not having had any portents, nor seen the moon over my left shoulder, nor had a salt-cellar upset, nor seen a bat fly into the window, nor heard a cricket chirp from the hearth, nor been one of thirteen persons at a table. But my common sense, and the family record, and the almanac tell me it ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... still. Very little time ago; but she was a woman now,—and, look here! A chance ray of sunlight slanted in, falling barely on the dust, the hot heaps of wool, waking a stronger smell of copperas; the chicken saw it, and began to chirp a weak, dismal joy, more sorrowful than tears. She went to the cage, and put her finger in for it to peck at. Standing there, if the vacant life coming rose up before her in that hard blare of sunlight, she looked at it with the same still, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... appear, but no one came, and he went up the hill to take an observation. A grove of pines covered one part of it, and from the heart of this green spot came a clearer sound than the soft sigh of the pines or the drowsy chirp of the crickets. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... the clatter of the carts, and the tramp of early passengers on the pave below, as they wended along to commence their daily toil. It was just sunrise, and the season was summer. A little canary bird, the only pet poor Lingave could afford to keep, chirp'd merrily in its cage on the wall. How slight a circumstance will sometimes change the whole current of our thoughts! The music of that bird abstracting the mind of the poet but a moment from his sorrows, gave a chance for his natural buoyancy ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... least of all His own doomsman." Her words seem'd to fall With a weight of tears in them. He look'd up, and saw That sad serene countenance, mournful as law And tender as pity, bow'd o'er him: and heard In some thicket the matinal chirp of a bird. ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... together, moistened with the spittle of the Great Elk, and fashioned into many little balls about the bigness of the eye-balls of a humming-bird[B]. When the mass had been all made into balls, he commanded all to be silent. When the camp had become so hushed, that the chirp of a grasshopper or the hum of a bee might have been heard from limit to limit, he ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... loveliness; they were content to feel it, and the perfection of the afternoon, whose low sun slanting over the landscape gave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a pensive sentiment of autumn to the world. The crickets cried amongst the grass; the hesitating chirp of birds came from the tree overhead; a shaggy colt left off grazing in the field and stalked up to stare at them; their little guides, having found that these people had no pleasure in the sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a precipice, threw themselves ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with dexterous audacity pinned their handiwork on to the cap of her neighbour Denis O'Meara, who sat all unawares. Thus it came to pass that when Hugh was at last roused to a vague sense of tittering all round him, which reached him much as the clacking chirp of sparrows gets meaninglessly into our frayed morning dreams, and looking up out of his reverie, stared about him for an explanation, the first thing his eyes lit on was Denis's smart cap surmounted by a mass of gaudy yellow ribbon in immense bows and loops and streamers, flapping ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... at this early hour; the birds were only beginning to chirp, and the vultures were just lazily assembling to see if they could discover one more morsel at the slaughtering-place of the ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... you. Let Mr. Powell come and see us happie; it may tend to make him soe. Let him and his abide with us, at the leaste, till the Spring; his Lads will studdy and play with mine, your Mother will help you in your Housewiferie, the two olde Men will chirp together beside the Christmasse Hearth; and, if I find thy Weeklie Bills the heavier 'twill be but to write another Book, and make a better Bargain for it than I did for the last. We will use Hospitalitie without grudging; and, as for your owne Increase of Cares, I suppose ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass; The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon, Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds, Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words, Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane That to our coming feet had been so plain, And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth, And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath, Amidst the wilding ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... it burst into a stream of song, 'while the lid performed a sort of jig, and clattered like a deaf and dumb cymbal that had never known the use of its twin brother.' Then the cricket came in with its chirp, chirp, chirp, and at it they went in fierce rivalry until 'the kettle, being dead beat, boiled over, and was taken off ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... are whist and the owl is still, The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, And naught is heard on the lonely hill, But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill, Of the gauze-winged katydid, And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will {417} Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings Ever a note of wail and woe, Till morning spreads her rosy wings, And earth and sky in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... showed the book to Mr. Nichols, and we had a pleasant talk, in the course of which she showed me the five facsimile volumes of Dickens's Christmas books, which he had issued. In particular, he read aloud to me the magnificent description of the boiling kettle in the first "Chirp" of "The Cricket on the Hearth," and pointed out to me how Dickens fell into rhyme in describing the song of the kettle. This passage Mr. Nichols read to me, standing in front of his fire, in a very musical and sympathetic tone of voice which pleased me exceedingly. I was strongly tempted to buy ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... shet my eyes now, as you sing it, And hear her low answerin' words; And then the glad chirp of the crickets, As clear as the twitter of birds; And the dust in the road is like velvet, And the ragweed and fennel and grass Is as sweet as the scent of the lilies Of Eden ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... a nose, for the reg'lars came [1] Whenever a pannie was done:— [2] Oh! who would chirp to dishonour his name, And betrays his pals in a nibsome game [3] To the traps?—Not I for one! [4] Let nobs in the fur trade hold their jaw, [5] And let the jug be free:— [6] Let Davy's dust and a well-faked claw ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... and silent in among the trees, whose great trunks towered up so high, and though we could hear a chirp now and then far above us in the leaves, all was as still as possible, not so much as a beetle or fly breaking the silence ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... the river we still came across birds and insects, but the further we went the more monotonous and dead Nature became. I could never have pictured such a lifeless wood to myself. No sound of insects was to be heard, no chirp or song of bird; and not even the trail of a serpent was to ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... its clay-cold breast, The Arctic Robin rais'd its nest, And rear'd its little fluttering young, Where Death in awful quiet slept, And fearless chirp'd, and gaily sung Around the babe its parents wept. It was the guardian of the grave, And thus its chirping seem'd to say:— "Tho' naught from Death's chill grasp could save, Tho' naught could chase his power away— As round this ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... laburnum, the lilac blaze of the rhododendron bushes. And how still the place was! Far off there was a dull roar of carriages in Piccadilly; but here there was nothing but the bleating of the sheep, the chirp of the young birds, the stir of the wind among the elms. Sometimes he could now catch ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... and fresh and still; Alone the chirp of flitting bird, And talk of children on the hill, And bell of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... shout of welcome when Winklemann's canoe was observed emerging from surrounding darkness, and a cheer burst from those who first heard the glad news—"The old folk saved!" But that was a mere chirp to the roar of congratulation that rang out when the little party landed, and the rescuers strode into camp bearing the rescued ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... "That was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell And wing our green to wed our blue; But whether note of joy or knell Not his own Father-singer knew; Nor yet can any mortal tell, Save only how it shivers through; The breast of us a sounded ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Skeleton Island, but saw—clear across the spit and the eastern lowlands—a great field of open sea upon the east. Sheer above us rose the Spyglass, here dotted with single pines, there black with precipices. There was no sound but that of the distant breakers, mounting from all round, and the chirp of countless insects in the brush. Not a man, not a sail, upon the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had he uttered the words when the cricket in the chimney corner chirped loudly, and his shrill notes seemed to say: "The king—the king." Rodolph could hardly believe his ears. How had the cricket learned to chirp these words? It was beyond all understanding. But still the cricket chirped, and still his musical monotone seemed to say, "The king—the king," until, with an angry frown, Rodolph strode from his house, leaving the child to ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... walked over from the Thurman ranch after doing the chores. To him she observed that Frank was an hour late, and Swan, whistling softly to Jack—Lorraine was surprised to hear how closely the call resembled the chirp of a bird—strode away without so much as a pretense at excuse. Lorraine stared after him wide-eyed, wondering and yet ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... crieth in the egg-shell, Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive ... He cometh forth from the egg, to chirp with all his might. He runneth about upon ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... in his ear mysterious words. Here a shrill chirp; there a click, like the click made with the tongue; further on, plaintive murmurs; in the distance a tinkle like that of the bell on the neck of the wandering ox. Suddenly Rey heard a strange sound, a rapid note, that could be ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... silence, resembling that which usually precedes the falling of the gallows drop. So profound, that the chirp of a tree cricket, even the rustling of a leaf, would seem a loud noise. So ominous, that the vultures perched upon the summit of the cliff crane out their ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... long-familiar, chanting monotones fainted and died in the portals of her ears like a nurse's song, while her sinking eyelids shut not out, but in, one tallish Rosemont senior who had risen in prayer visibly heavy with the sleep he had robbed from three successive nights. The chirp of a lone cricket somewhere under the floor led her forth in a half dream beyond the town and the gleaming turnpike, across wide fields whose multitudinous, tiny life rasped and buzzed under ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... the morning broke, and the early birds began to chirp in the ivy and to prune their plumage and flutter among the leaves; and down the street tramped the feet of the toilers on their way to forge and dock. Over the harbor came the daffodil light from the sun-tipped ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... over, when they hop away, scolding furiously at being disturbed. They are fond of bathing, and after a rain may be seen in crowds fluttering and splashing in the pools of water in the street. The cold winter does not molest them. They continue as plump and jolly and independent as ever, and chirp and hop about as merrily on a ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... modeled it within with wood and clay. And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew, There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers, Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue: And there I witnessed in the summer hours A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly, Glad as the ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... bear was gone, the little gray robin hopped near. Her chirp was quite sad. She, too, saw nothing but a little heap of ashes as gray as her ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets
... Reality underlying all phenomena. The same may be accomplished with the "audible," which is indeed part of the same physical film, though this is not at first easy to recognise. As pointed out in View No. 1, there is little in common between our sense of sight and hearing; but the chirp of birds, the hum of bees, the rustle of wind in the leaves, the ripple of a stream, the distant sound of sheep bells, and lowing of cattle form a background of sound which may be coaxed to approach you; the only ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... horse of mighty pow'r, Compact in frame, and strong of limb; Went with a chirp from hour to hour; Whip-cord! ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... bowling along the quiet country road, only the chirp of many locusts, the rumble of the wheels, and the sound of their own voices to break the stillness. Ferry leaned forward. Constance was at the farther end of the ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... put a block the under side of the log, above the skids, to keep it from rolling back. Having given a hard lift, and tugging with all his might, the father called out, "There, Johnny, put under your block quick." John started nimbly, and snatched up his block, when suddenly the loud chirp of a squirrel struck his ear. Instantly, down went his block, and away he ran after the squirrel, leaving his father and the other man to hold the log ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... dried lips tried to laugh. "Ef it ain't the dicky-bird!" The bird looked at him. "Ef that doesn't beat—" but he could not think what it "beat." The bird cocked its head. "Ain't ye afeard o' me?" It gave a feeble chirp. "Well, I'm damned!" said the man, and after this mild expression of his feelings, forgot to curse again. He even began to eye the island with a vague questioning wonder, as if asking himself what means might be thought of that would enable him ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... background of dark foliage, were silently and dexterously maneuvered by small yellow men, stark naked, with long hair piled up in womanlike fashion on their heads. Gradually, as we advanced further up the green channel, the perfumes became more penetrating, and the monotonous chirp of the cicalas swelled out like an orchestral crescendo. Above us, on the luminous sky, sharply delineated between the mountains, a species of hawk hovered about, screaming out with a deep human voice, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Windermere; every bush, every tree—yea, it seemed as if every branch sent forth the music of singing birds, and the very air was redolent with melody, from the bold songs of the thrush and the lark to the love-note of the wood-pigeon; and even the earth rejoiced in the chirp of the grasshopper, its tiny but pleasant musician. The fields and the leaves were in the loveliness and freshness of youth, luxuriating in the sunbeams, in the depth of their summer green; and the butterfly sported, and the bee pursued its errand from flower to flower. The mighty ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... door when Swan appeared unexpectedly before her, having walked over from the Thurman ranch after doing the chores. To him she observed that Frank was an hour late, and Swan, whistling softly to Jack—Lorraine was surprised to hear how closely the call resembled the chirp of a bird—strode away without so much as a pretence at excuse. Lorraine stared after him wide-eyed, wondering and yet not daring ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the utmost decorum. When they gaily had caroll'd till peep of the dawn, The Lark gently hinted, 'twas time to be gone; And his clarion, so shrill, gave the company warning, That Chanticleer scented the gales of the morning. So they chirp'd, in full chorus, a friendly adieu; And, with hearts beating light as the plumage that grew On their merry-thought bosoms, away ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... would have jumped to have had this chance of going to live in a palace, but this farmer said, "Give me my farmhouse and my quiet grave beside my mother." Elevation may undo us. A sparrow could only chirp even though in a golden cage. Barzillai felt, "A rustic, like I am, seems all right among my ploughs and cattle, but I should not fit a palace." Many a man has made himself a laughing stock because he left the place he was fitted for, and so looked like ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... fragment of wing also suggested its probable size when unbroken. It was perhaps two inches long. As there are little horny rings round the wing base like those which crickets have, on which they rub their legs and so "chirp," it is also quite likely that this insect of hoary antiquity did the same, and enlivened the silence of Devonian fern groves with a prehistoric hum. It is quite in keeping with modern ideas that in that age of fishes one of the most remarkable insects should have been ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... hot—the skies were too blue, The grass, he was certain, was damp where he lay, All things had conspired to annoy him that day, He could bear neither sunshine, the mirth that he heard, The hum of the bees, nor the chirp of a bird. How silly they seemed—it made him so cross— The pleasures of life were nothing but dross, So he hastened away in a fit of despair; All things were against him and "nothing was fair." And now, little people, does ...
— Nestlings - A Collection of Poems • Ella Fraser Weller
... dusty blossoms blackbirds meet, And robins pipe amid the cedars nigher. Thro' the still elms I hear the ferry's beat. The swallows chirp about the towering spire; The whole air pulses with its weight of sweet, Yet not ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the bushes and found the nest, low enough for Billy to reach. There were two other little baby-birds in it and when Billy put in the little bird that had fallen, they all began to chirp, "Peep! Peep! Peep!" That meant "Thank you!" Then the mother-bird hopped around so gladly and said "Thank you, little ...
— The Grasshopper Stories • Elizabeth Davis Leavitt
... whist, and the owl is still, The bat in the shelvy rock is hid; And naught is heard on the lonely hill But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill Of the gauze-winged katydid; And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings, Ever a note of wail and woe, Till morning spreads her rosy wings And earth and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... feathers, and the fish has scales, overlapping each other as the slates on the roof of a house do, thus making a perfectly waterproof coat for its whole body; the bird has legs and wings, and the fish has neither; the bird can chirp and sing, while fishes generally ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... and cracking of the trees in the frosty air, the fall of a decayed branch, the tapping of a solitary woodpecker, two or three small species of which still remain after all the summer birds are flown; and the gentle, weak chirp of the little tree-creeper, as it runs up and down the hemlocks and pines, searching the crevices of the bark for insects. Yet in all this seeming death lies hidden the life of myriads of insects, the huge beast of the forest, asleep in his lair, with many ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... me no one had been here? (Shakes his finger at her.) My little song-bird must never do that again. A song-bird must have a clean beak to chirp with—no false notes! (Puts his arm round her waist.) That is so, isn't it? Yes, I am sure it is. (Lets her go.) We will say no more about it. (Sits down by the stove.) How warm and snug it is here! (Turns ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... a nun is she; One weak chirp is her only note. Braggart, and prince of braggarts is he, Pouring boasts from his little throat: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, Never was I afraid of man; Catch me, cowardly knaves, if you can, Chee, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... much less startling sound would have awakened a whole city household; but slumber in the country has a slumber of its own: in summer time a slumber born of night-air, laden with the odors of vegetation, and silent except for the drowsy chirp of birds that stir in vine and tree. The wife awoke first, listened for a second, and aroused her husband, who went to the window. He raised the screen ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... he lives in the corner by the fireplace. When all is still we hear his cheery chirp! ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley
... horses, and mowing down the thick, waving grass, as a war hero mows down his enemies. And as he stepped into the office he seemed to hear the clicking noise of the reaper, the soft swish of falling grass and the shrill chirp and light flutter of ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... smile will visit his pale face when you chirp tenderly to him, and a faint tinge comes upon his cheek when you lay your soft tiny hand upon it; yet all the while there is that desperate secret lying next his heart, and, like a vampire, sucking away, drop by drop, ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... doomsman." Her words seem'd to fall With a weight of tears in them. He look'd up, and saw That sad serene countenance, mournful as law And tender as pity, bow'd o'er him: and heard In some thicket the matinal chirp of a bird. ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... grass Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass; The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon, Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds, Forgetful of the spring-time's lyric words, Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane That to our coming feet had been so plain, And lost ourselves among the sweetfern's growth, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... in his Port, though, to do him justice, he wrestled hard with this great heresy. His friends perceived the decay in his belief sooner than he did himself. He was sour in the evening as in the morning. There was no chirp in him when the bottle went round. He had never one hour of a humane mood to be reckoned on now. The day, indeed, is sad when we see the skeleton of the mistress by whom we suffer, but cannot abandon her. The squire drank, knowing that the issue would be the terrific, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was choked by her sobs. The whole valley was deserted and silent in the dazzling light and the overwhelming heat, and only the grasshoppers uttered their shrill, continuous chirp among the sparse yellow grass on both sides of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the willow-wrens: two I know perfectly; but have not been able yet to procure the third. No two birds can differ more in their notes, and that constancy, than those two that I am acquainted with; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note; the other a harsh loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three-quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drams and a half; while the latter weighs but two: so the songster is one-fifth heavier than the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer-bird of passage that is heard, the wryneck sometimes ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... twilight of a summer's morning, and the little birds had begun to chirp their matins, and the lark to brush the dew from her speckled breast, waiting for the first gaze of the sun. The old man pressed the infant closer to his bosom as he drew nigh to the steep acclivity, the solitary dwelling of the eagle. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... wild pink rose! How rich that buoyant air with changing scent Of pungent pine, fresh flowers and salt cool seas! And when all echoes of the chase had died, Of horn and halloo, bells and baying hounds, How mine ears drank the ripple of the tide On that fair shore, the chirp of unseen birds, The rustling of the tangled undergrowth, And the deep lyric murmur of the pines, When through their high tops swept the sudden breeze! There was my world, there would my heart dilate, And my aspiring soul dissolve in prayer Unto that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... repeated, and then answered from behind them, and followed directly after by a piping whistle and a chirp. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... the skies, their slender branches forming a dark network overhead, and their lofty proportions lessening in the distance, until lost in the solemn gloom beyond. A religious silence prevailed, broken only by the occasional chirp of the wren, or the soft pattering of some smaller ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... air was tremulous with sounds: The thrilling chirp of insects, twittering birds, Barking of shepherds' fierce, white, Roman dogs; While from the narrow path, far down below, We heard a mournful rondinella ring, Sung ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... rest, Must burn for ever in my breast. Yet how ecstatically sweet, Was its first soft tumultuous beat! I little thought that beat could be The harbinger of misery; And daily, when the morning beam Dawned earliest on wood and stream, When, from each brake and bush were heard, The hum of bee, and chirp of bird, From these, earth's matin songs, my ear Would turn, a sweeter voice to hear— A voice, whose tones the very air Seemed trembling with delight to bear; From leafy wood, and misty stream, From bush, and brake, and morning beam, Would turn away ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... she went on tiptoe to extinguish the candle. All was silent: the grey light of the morning was now spreading over every object; the sun rose slowly, and Susan stood at the lattice window, looking through the small leaded, cross-barred panes at the splendid spectacle. A few birds began to chirp; but, as Susan was listening to them, her mother started in her sleep, and spoke unintelligibly. Susan hung up a white apron before the window to keep out the light, and just then she heard the sound of music at a distance in the village. ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... the Mistress's soft chirp. It had not reached his dulling ears;—the ears which, of old, had caught her faintest whisper. Yet, he would have followed her, as ever, without such summons, had not his nostrils suddenly become ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... baa^, bleat [lamb]; low, moo [cow, cattle]; troat^, croak, peep [frog]; coo [dove, pigeon]; gobble [turkeys]; quack [duck]; honk, gaggle, guggle [goose]; crow, caw, squawk, screech, [crow]; cackle, cluck, clack [hen, rooster, poultry]; chuck, chuckle; hoot, hoo [owl]; chirp, cheep, chirrup, twitter, cuckoo, warble, trill, tweet, pipe, whistle [small birds]; hum [insects, hummingbird]; buzz [flying insects, bugs]; hiss [snakes, geese]; blatter^; ratatat [woodpecker]. Adj. crying &c v.; blatant, latrant^, remugient^, mugient^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... brook-side, I wandered by the mill,— I could not hear the brook flow, The noisy wheel was still; There was no burr of grasshopper, No chirp of any bird, But the beating of my own heart Was all ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... the marble hand of the Madonna. Then, with a joyful chirp, dropped straight to the couch on ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... spear over his head and emitted a shriek compared to which the Rebel yell was a chirp from the weakened lungs ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... rippling tides, From thicket to thicket the angler glides; Or the simpler comes, with basket and book, For herbs of power on thy banks to look; Or haply, some idle dreamer, like me, To wander, and muse, and gaze on thee. Still—save the chirp of birds that feed On the river cherry and seedy reed, And thy own wild music gushing out With mellow murmur of fairy shout, From dawn to the blush of another day, Like traveller singing along ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... trained. (Good children run in the family.) I record, pridefully, that the sunny head of the least of the band has never drooped drowsily while the tale went on, and that his chirp was distinct in the general plea for, "More—to-morrow night?" with which the conclave brought up at the call to prayers and to pillows. This has not so far flattered me out of my sober senses as to beget a hope ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... Considering his presence I wondered that the garden was always so full of singing birds. But the Captain never meddled with them. Probably he understood that his master would not have tolerated it for a moment. So there was always a song or a chirp somewhere. Overhead flew the gulls and the cranes. The wind in the pines always made a glad salutation. Abel and I paced the walks, in high converse on matters beyond the ken of cat ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... lesser quantities. The eggs, four or five in number, average .56 by .44, are pure white, profusely spotted with red, and sometimes have also a few spots of purplish grey. On the 15th June I found a nest with four young ones on the south side of the Pir-Pinjal Pass. This bird has no song, only a double chirp in addition to its callnote. The double chirp, which is very loud, is intended for a song, for the male bird incessantly repeats it as he feeds from tree to tree near where the female is sitting upon ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... seeing their belief in a common reality—all this slipped from him. So he might have felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty blue had hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the presence of one woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his head awakened him, and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here was the world in which he had lived; here the plowed field, the high road yonder, and Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up with her ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Babel streams we'll weep, To think upon our Zion; And hing our fiddles up to sleep, [hang] Like baby-clouts a-dryin'; Come, screw the pegs wi' tunefu' cheep, [chirp] And o'er the thairms be tryin'; [strings] O, rare! to see our elbucks wheep, [elbows jerk] And a' like lamb-tails flyin' Fu' ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... the melody of the bobolink along the meadow-brook; indeed, the birds of all sorts were astir, skimming along the ground or rising to the sky, keeping watch especially over the garden and the fruit-trees, carrying food to their nests, or teaching their young broods to fly and to chirp the songs of summer. And from the woodshed the shrill note of the scythe under the action of the grindstone. No such vivid realization of summer ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... now in earnest, and the beaming colored boy holds his lantern to guide us along the path, while Maggie whinnies after us her adieu. The grasshoppers chirp merrily in the sodden grass, and now and then a startled rabbit darts out of the wood and crosses close to our feet. The light is almost blinding as we enter the cheerful dining-room, where supper is laid on the snowy cloth, and are introduced to the charming family circle of the ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... Storborg, by Breidablik, and the sound follows them all the way from the hills here and there; 'tis no military music like in the towns, nay, but voices—a proclamation: Spring has come. Then suddenly the first chirp of a bird is heard from a treetop, waking others, and a calling and answering on every side; more than a song, it is a hymn of praise. The emigrant feels home-sick already, maybe, something weak and helpless in him; he is going off to America, and none could ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... betray the presence of their nests, but the Kentucky warblers seldom do so, knowing too well how to keep their procreant secrets. They have evidently learned the use of strategy, as you will see: One day a pair began to chirp vigorously as I approached their demesne in a lonely hollow, and I felt a thrill of joy at the prospect of finding a nest. One of them even flitted about with a worm in its bill—a sure sign of nestlings in the neighborhood. ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Pauline followed the flight of his thought with difficulty. After the third phrase anything read aloud made her feel drowsy, and the affairs of her household took on an absurd importance; one might say that the voice of the reader made them chirp like birds in a cage. It was in vain that she tried to follow on Clerambault's lips, and even to imitate with her own, the words whose meaning she no longer understood; her eye mechanically noted a hole in the cloth, her fingers picked at the crumbs on the table, her ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... long-drawn crowing of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far off, from some farm-house away among the hills; but it was like a dreaming sound in his ear. No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bull-frog from a neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably and turning suddenly in ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... train-schedules. And as Mrs. Harrington does not travel to the city, even this charge will not hold against her. And yet I cannot help feeling that neither of the two really hears the catbird say "miaow" or the robin "cheer up," as they pretend to. At the first twitter or chirp from some invisible source Mrs. Harrington stops and with radiant face asks me whether I do not distinctly catch the "pit-pit-pity-me" of the meadow-lark. I say yes; but I really don't, and I don't believe she does. My explanation is that Mrs. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... Milly's credit that she took rather less satisfaction in all this social flattery than in the happiness her engagement brought into the little Acacia Street house. Horatio began to chirp once more, after the interview with his prospective son-in-law. The inspissated gloom of the days of stringency had passed. The golden beams of prosperity seemed to radiate from ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... uncovered, and revealed the light on the desk where the master wrote. He heard the scratching of his pen on the paper, and the patter of rain-drops outside, for the night was stormy. There was another sound in the shop, softer than fall of the rain, and finer than chirp of a cricket, or humming sound of a mosquito: the toys in ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... percussive smack; still another, a sharp, prolonged hissing or sibilant but at the same time metallic note, compared by some one to the sound produced by milking a cow into a tin pail—a very good description. There are other lesser notes: a musical, thrush-like chirp, repeated slowly, and sometimes rapidly till it runs to a bubbling sound; also there is a horny sound, which is perhaps produced by striking upon the edges of the lower mandible with those of the upper. But it is quite unlike ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... sensitive years have never known such a night. The world was stifling in a deluge of gray, cold mists, unstirred by a breath of air. A robin with feathers all ruffled, and head hidden, sat on the gate-post, and chirped a little mournful chirp, like a creature dying in a vacuum. The very daisy that nodded and drooped in the grass at my feet seemed to be gasping for breath. The neighbor's house, not forty paces across the street, was invisible. ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... alarmed at the expression in his companion's face, rose also, and for several minutes the silence was only broken by the crackling of the burning wood in the fireplace, the shrill chirp of a cricket and the plaintive call of a whip-poor-will from without. Then with a look of superstitious awe and terror upon his thin face, the moonshiner gasped, in a choking voice, "Boyd City—Richard Falkner—Mister, aint yo' mistaken? Say, ar' ye ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... yesterday, sweet child, Prattling thus happily! So fledglings wild, New-hatched in warmer nest 'neath sheltering bough, Chirp merrily to feel their feathers grow. Your mouth's a rose, Jeanne! In these volumes grand Whose pictures please you—while I trembling stand To see their big leaves tattered by your hand— Are noble lines; but nothing ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... fleece, and littering the black soil with leaves among which runs a constant querulous hissing and rustling. Also, storks are uttering their snapping cry, sleek rooks cawing, steppe grasshoppers maintaining their tireless chirp, sturdy, well-grown husbandmen uttering shouts like words of command, the threshing-floors of the rolling steppe diffusing a rain of golden chaff, and eddying whirlwinds catching up stray poultry feathers, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... sings upon the budding spray, I hear the clarion tones of chanticleer, And robins chirp about from break of day,— All pipe their ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... in Sister Lizzie's bed, and looked so pretty in her sleep that Abby came three times to wake her, and three times went away again, unable to spoil so perfect a picture. At last, however, the dark eyes opened of their own accord, and Marie began to chirp and twitter, like a bird at daybreak in its nest; only instead of daybreak, it was eight o'clock in the morning, a most shocking hour for anybody to be getting up. But Abby had been in the habit of spoiling her ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... The chirp and chatter of the young of birds which build in concealed or inclosed places, like the woodpeckers, the house wren, the high-hole, the oriole, is in marked contrast to the silence of the fledglings of most birds that build open and exposed nests. ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... building in a tall tree overhead; and the sweet, clear notes of one of them delighted Master Sunshine until he heard the mate answering back with a harsh, scraping noise not unlike a dull saw making its way through a log of knotted wood. A robin gave a mellow chirp; and the Peabody bird was filling the air with ...
— Master Sunshine • Mrs. C. F. Fraser
... heard a faint noise. Routing out the good old creature, that I might take observations, eggs still, and no chickens, were discernible, but the tiniest, little, silvery, sunny-hearted chirp that you ever heard, inside the eggs, and a little, tender pecking from every imprisoned chick, standing at his crystal door, and, with his faint, fairy knock, knock, knock, craving admission into the great world. Never can I forget or describe the sensations of that moment; and, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... interval of silence, resembling that which usually precedes the falling of the gallows drop. So profound, that the chirp of a tree cricket, even the rustling of a leaf, would seem a loud noise. So ominous, that the vultures perched upon the summit of the cliff crane out their ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... in these retired waters. Her undertakings are secure and never fail. If I were awakened from a deep sleep, I should know which side of the meridian the sun might be by the aspect of nature, and by the chirp of the crickets, and yet no painter can paint this difference. The landscape contains a thousand dials which indicate the natural divisions of time, the shadows of a thousand styles point to ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... extraordinary luxuriance that few of the sun's rays could penetrate the massy net-work of leaves and branches forming the roof of our fairy passage. Not a single bird could be seen, either seated or on the wing; nor was even a chirp distinguishable above the dreamy hum of millions of mosquitoes floating about, in a calm so profound, that it seemed as if the surface of the water had never been disturbed since the Creation. The air, though cool, felt so heavy and choky, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... the hut, because Granny would have some work to do in the village after selling her bundle of sticks and twigs. It was during these long days that little Gretchen had taught herself to sing the song which the wind sang to the pine branches. In the summer time she learned the chirp and twitter of the birds, until her voice might almost be mistaken for a bird's voice; she learned to dance as the swaying shadows did, and even to talk to the stars which shone through the little square window when Granny came home too late ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... her pillow, and she kept spreading them out, and making us read them, and—oh! their braveness and cheeriness—they did quite seem to hold one up! And then poor little Minna's constant little robin-chirp of faith, "God will not let them hurt him." One could not bear to tell the child, that though indeed they cannot hurt him, it may not be in her sense! Look here! These are her slippers. She has worked on all day to finish them, that they might be done and out of sight when he came ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... greedily drank it off, for I was intensely thirsty. Axinya had quite recently scrubbed the table and benches, and there was that smell in the kitchen which is found in bright, snug kitchens kept by tidy cooks. And that smell and the chirp of the cricket used to lure us as children into the kitchen, and put us in the mood for hearing fairy tales and playing at ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... night as Barry and his crew spent up the river, waiting for the moon; and the mysterious night noises from the shore were lulling and drowsy. Gradually the schooner blurred into a vague mass of shadow, out of which the two lights twinkled uncertainly. And mingling with the chirp of insects and the fitful cries of dreaming monkeys came a gnawing and rasping of wood that seemed to echo throughout ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... chick enlarges, but is at the same time applied closer to the internal surface of the shell; when the time of hatching approaches the chick is liable to break this air-bag with its beak, and thence begin to breathe and to chirp; at this time the edges of the enlarged air-bag extend so as to cover internally one hemisphere of the egg; and as one half of the external shell is thus moist, and the other half dry, as soon as the mother hearing the chick chirp, or the chick itself ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... gracious mother's wiles And dear delusive smiles! No callow fledgling of her singing brood But tastes that witching food, And hearing overhead the eagle's wing, And how the thrushes sing, Vents his exiguous chirp, and from his nest Flaps forth—we know the rest. I own the weakness of the tuneful kind,— Are not all harpers blind? I sang too early, must I sing too late? The lengthening shadows wait The first pale stars of twilight,—yet ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... cautiously, the key in Link's pocket, they drifted through the swing door, as air might have circulated, identifying the mouse's scuttle, the rattle of a rat among the loose coal in the cellar bin, the throaty chirp of a cricket outside in ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... moon-lit nave; and where Durdles, waving his lantern, waves the dim angels' heads upon the corbels of the roof, seeming to watch their progress. Anon they turn into narrower and steeper staircases, and the night-air begins to blow upon them, and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened rook precedes the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the beating down of dust and straws upon their heads. At last, leaving their light behind a stair—for it blows fresh up here—they look down on Cloisterham, fair to see ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... sparrows made their home; the rustling of the leaves and twigs commingled with the chirp and joyous noise of the birds; in the eaves of the house the doves had built their nests, and the place was filled with their speech, cooing and calling to each other, entreating and discussing as is customary between doves, these noisy ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the walls. The night was interminably long, yet she prayed to hold back the dawn. What would another day bring forth? The blackness of her room seemed blacker for the sad, entering gray of morning light. She heard the chirp of awakening birds, and fancied she caught a faint clatter of hoofs. Then low, dull distant, throbbed a heavy gunshot. She had expected it, was waiting for it; nevertheless, an electric shock checked her heart, ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... are little else; do you not chirp all over, Mohi? By my demi-god soul, were I not what I am, this wine would almost get the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... night comes on apace; The cricket's chirp, the woodland murmur's swell, Bid nature's changeling melodies efface The glamour of yon phantom spell. The flashing morn adown the glist'ning aisles, A dew-embowered hill and grove and lea, With ruthless light will scatter fairy wiles, Nor leave my ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... in his own handwriting: the second, the fourth, and the concluding verses bear the Burns' stamp, which no one has been successful in counterfeiting: they resemble the verses of Beattie, to which Chambers has compared them, as little as the cry of the eagle resembles the chirp of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... dreaming, content. And it was then that he caught and imprisoned in colour the nameless beauty which was the foundation for his first famous picture, whose snowy splendour silenced all except those little critics who chirp automatically, eternally, on the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the morning. Mrs. Cricky carried her head down, and when she ran she scuttled, and when she stopped she was absolutely still, except for her eyes, which she turned about brightly in every direction. Mrs. Cricky was looking for food for Chee, Chirk and Chirp. Usually Mr. Cricky brought home the food, but he was a member of the Marsh Grass Vesper Quartette—made up of himself, Miss K. T. Did, Mr. Frisky Frog and Mr. Tree Toad Todson, first cousin to Toadie Todson—and they had all been out very late the night before, so Mrs. Cricky didn't wish ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... a few months in the summer. That is the reason he is called the "Bird of Society." When he is merry, he gaily sings, "Conk-quer-ree." When he is angry or frightened he screams, "Chock! Chock!" When he is flying or bathing he gives a sweet note which sounds like ee-u-u. He can chirp—chick, check, chuck, to his little ones as softly as any other bird. But only his best friends ever hear his sweetest tones, for the Blackbirds do not know how to be polite. They all talk at once. That is why most people think they only scream and chatter. Did you ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... them. And around him Roger saw, emerging from the semi-dark, faces turning like his own to the summits of the mountains and the billowy splendors there. It grew so dark he could see no more. There fell a deep silence, not a sound but the occasional chirp of a bird or the faint whirr of an insect. Even the glow on the peaks was ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... they gaily had caroll'd till peep of the dawn, The Lark gently hinted 'twas time to be gone; And his clarion, so shrill, gave the company warning, That Chanticleer scented the gales of the morning, So they chirp'd in full chorus, a friendly adieu; And, with hearts beating light as the plumage that grew On their merry-thought bosoms, ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... silently, for even the domestics hardly spoke above a whisper; and then we sat in the soft moonlight and looked on the sleeping scene before us. The summer sounds of rural life had long died away, and nothing but the untiring chirp of the tree-toad was to be heard. The melancholy monotony of the scene hushed Mary's spirit to a quiet she had not for a long time known, and at last she became conscious ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... did not annoy her to-day. She stepped rapidly through the expanse of it that girdled the forest, and hurried on through the firs to the cottage. The whole wood was alive with hum and cry. Wherever a group of other trees rose amid the firs, the loud chirp of the chaffinch was heard, or the eager twitter of some little newly-wedded birds, disputing about the position of their nest. The beetle in his black cuirass droned around the buds of the chestnut; at times a wild bee, newly wakened from its winter sleep, came humming by; even brown ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Pines make sweet music; sad, plaintive, for must there not be a tone of "infinite sadness" in all the places of Earth's finite gladness? From a spray of jessamine I hear the chirp of a little bird—a young beginner; it tries over and over again "its one plain passage of few notes"—the prelude to the full-voice anthem which summer will harmonize. Ah! what shades and sunlight! what coloring! Green in the grass and trees, blue in the ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... that tender, touching little act except a grimy sparrow on the leads, and he flew off with a loud chirp, and, joining a neighbour on the old stunted tree, made so much noise that it was just possible he was delivering his opinion of the ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... lord, after dinner. I work hard all the morning at serious things, sometimes till I get a headache, which, however, does not often trouble me. After dinner I like to crack my bottle and chirp and talk nonsense, and fit myself for the company of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... out another little chirp of laughter. "You'll remember what they say of a secret, Captain—too big for one, right for two, tight ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... questioningly, and when at last she recognized him, she burst out into a merry peal of laughter. "Truly," said she, "my mother had a rendezvous with her husband, and I have disturbed an enchanting marriage chirping. You have also listened to my married chirp, and know all my secrets. Well, what do you say, dear stepfather, to my mother having brought me so soon under the coif, and made her wild, foolish little Camilla the wife ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... field. And fur away over the green hills and woods of the east, the moon was a risin', big and calm and silvery. And we could hear the plaintive evenin' song of the thrush, and the crickets' happy chirp, till we got nearer the schoolhouse, when they sort o' blended in with 'There is a fountain filled with blood,' and ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... bow, staggering under tons of water, and the whir of the screw in mid-air. The captain glanced at the barometer, drew his body to its full height, reached for his storm-coat, slipped it on, and was about to swing back the door opening on the deck, when the chirp of a canary rang through the room. At the sound he turned quickly and walked back ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... far before they became aware of a strange silence, if silence it could be called, for when they listened the silence was full of sound, innumerable little sounds, some of which they recognised; but it was not the hum of the insects or the chirp of a bird or the snapping of a rotten twig that filled Joseph with awe, but something that he could neither see, nor hear, nor smell, nor touch. The life of the trees—is that it? he asked himself. A remote and mysterious life was ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... general level, and provided with numerous culverts and bridges to prevent the damming of the waters and the danger of washing away the road. The jungle is full of busy life. The air is thick with the low, murmuring hum of busy insect-life, birds shriek, whistle, call, hoot, peep, chirp, and sing among the intertwining branches, and frogs croak hoarsely in the watery shallows beneath. Noises, too, are heard, that would puzzle, I venture to say, many a scholarly, book-wise and specimen-wise naturalist to define as coming from the articulatory organs ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and the door of the wing swung open for the first time in four long months. There, Peter, in the side of the wing where you see the ends of two or three bricks protruding from a circular hole in the clapboards, is the nest of a pair of wrens that year after year come back to rear a new family, and chirp and chatter away the summer, when their labors have ceased. If it were a few weeks later, you might get acquainted with the comical little occupants, who are as brisk and busy as if they were not in reality great grand-parents ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Willie Wallace came through the caboose, and the train stopped. I looked out and saw we was alongside a corn-crib—nothin' else; but we began to back on to a switch, and pretty soon stopped. And now it was so still that you could hear the crickets chirp in the grass. It was a lonely country here—flat and sandy. Mitch and I got down and went to the back platform to see what Willie Wallace was doin'. He was standin' by the switch. And pretty soon the passenger train ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... the fire was out, and that the man was cold. He fluttered among the ashes until he found a bit of live coal. With a glad chirp, he flew out through the roof. Soon he was back, with his bill full of dried twigs. He placed them on the fire and began to fan them into flame with his wings. Soon the twigs were blazing. Then he flew out for more twigs,—and ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... house your trembling form, There shall your shiv'ring breast be warm: And, when your little heart grows strong, I'll ask you for your simple song; And, when you will not tarry more, Open shall be my wicket-door; And freely, when you chirp "adieu," I'll wish you well, sweet warbler! too; I'll wish you many a summer-hour On top of tree, or abbey-tow'r. When Spring her wasted form retrieves, And gives your little roof its leaves, May you (a happy lover) find A kindred partner ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... of the bird with a peculiar whistling sound in his throat, that was a marvelous imitation of a sparrow's chirp, and the little boy clapped his hands with delight, and insisted ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... nor you needn't, no more than other folk; for the tongue, be it never so bitin', it can't draw blood, mind ye, and hard words break no bones; and I'll make a cup o' tea—ye like a cup o' tea—and we'll take a cup together, and ye'll chirp up a bit, and see how pleasant and ruddy the sun shines ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... chair for a moment and close my eyes. I am back once more in the dear old lane among the haws and the filberts. I catch once more the smell of the brier. I see again the squirrel up there in the oak and the rabbit under the hedge. I listen as of old to the chirp of the grasshopper in the stubble, to the hum of the bees among the foxgloves, to the song of the blackbird on the hawthorn, and, best of all—yes, best of all for brain unsteadied and nerve unstrung—I see ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... the readers of YOUNG PEOPLE would like to hear about a young robin my papa found under a cherry-tree near the house. He thought I could raise him, and take him back to New York for a pet. But after I had kept him two days in my room, he would chirp so mournfully when he heard the other birds singing merrily outside that it made me feel so sorry, I took him and put him on a branch of the tree. Oh, I wish you could have seen him flap his wings with delight. Then the old birds came, so glad to greet him. And ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... when Dame Nature brought back the spring, Brought back the birds to chirp and sing, Melted the snow and warmed the sky, Little Jack Frost went pouting by. The flowers opened their eyes of blue, Green buds peeped out and grasses grew; It was so warm and scorched him so, Little Jack Frost ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... winter, in the hope of finding, among the myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms. We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose every ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... superlatively absurd. "Where was the object?" I would ask myself. Moreover, it was too late; and I went on dreaming with open eyes, careering on horseback through the savannas, listening at break of day to the prattle of the parrots in the guava-trees, at nightfall to the chirp of the grillos in the cane-fields, or else smoking my cigar, taking my coffee, rocking myself in a hammock,—in short, enjoying all the delights that are the very heart-blood of a guajiro, and out of the sphere of which he can see but death, or, what is worse to him, the feverish ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... mouthful of burnt tail-feathers. Whitebird was safe, safe in the narrow passage where the dragon could not follow. Up and up and up and up he feebly fluttered into the light of the dear outside world, and then he gave a chirp of joy to find that he really had escaped. But oh, how tired and ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... felt neither troubled nor afraid. She lay there with her face upturned to the pelting rain, watching it patter from leaf to leaf, listening to the chirp of the birds in the nests, listening to the crying of the wind. She liked the sound. She had a dim notion that it was like an old camp-meeting hymn that she had heard Creline sing sometimes. She never understood the words, but the music came back like a dream. She wondered ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... and proceeded to limp about the apartment, clearing his throat the while with that odd musical chirp which had already grown so irritating in the ears of Denis de Beaulieu. He first possessed himself of some papers which lay upon the table; then he went to the mouth of the passage and appeared to give an order to the men behind the arras; and lastly he hobbled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... against me—for the moment. Camma—well, well, I never found the woman I could not force or wheedle to my will. She will be glad at last to wear my crown. And I will make Galatia prosperous too, And we will chirp among our vines, and smile At bygone things till that (pointing to SINNATUS) eternal peace. ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... [ur] her bird work urn fern sir word turn term stir worm hurt herd girl world purr jerk first worst burn ever chirp worth churn serve whirl worse burst perch thirst worship church kernel fir worthy curve verse firm worry curb verb third fur germ birth blur herb birch ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... and down, stretching their hands nervously as if unused to gloves. Presently they fell back, and the organ, in the hands of an amateur performer and an inadequate blower, began to chirp and hoot merrily, by which we knew the bridal ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Hawaii, a fact of marked interest to science in observing environmental effect upon the differentiation of species. One of these the natives call pupu kani oi or "shrill voiced snail," averring that a certain cricketlike chirp that rings through the stillness of the almost insectless valleys is the voice of this particular species. Emerson says that the name kahuli is applied to the land snail to describe the peculiar tilting motion as the snail crawls ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... that years ago a beautiful little brown sparrow made her home in the garden of a certain great and renowned magician. She built her nest in the grass, and was content to hop and chirp about in the rose thicket, and to keep very near the ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... cabin, the mother stirred from an uneasy sleep. She shook her husband and listened intently. The only sound that came from without was the chirp of crickets and the distant call of a coyote from ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... the winds are singing In the happy summer time— When the raptured air is ringing With earth's music heavenward springing, Forest chirp and village chime— Is there, of the sounds that float Unsighingly, a single note Half so sweet, and clear, and wild, As ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... Solomon's temple was building it was credibly reported that at least 10,000 sparrows sitting on the trees round declared that it was entirely wrong—quite contrary to received opinion—hopelessly condemned by public opinion, etc. Nevertheless it got finished and the sparrows flew away and began to chirp in the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... hurt you, little mother. Don't be afraid," whispered the child; and, as if it understood, the bird settled down on her nest with a comfortable chirp, while its mate hopped up to give her a nice plump worm ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... for the reg'lars came [1] Whenever a pannie was done:— [2] Oh! who would chirp to dishonour his name, And betrays his pals in a nibsome game [3] To the traps?—Not I for one! [4] Let nobs in the fur trade hold their jaw, [5] And let the jug be free:— [6] Let Davy's dust and a well-faked claw [7] For fancy coves be the only law, [8] And a double-tongued squib to keep in ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... Carlin, old woman. Cates, dainties. Cauld, cold. Caup, cup. Celness, coldness. Cess, excise, tax. Chafe, chafing. Change-house, tavern. Chapman, peddler. Chapournelie, hat. Chelandri, goldfinch. Cheres, cheers. Cheves, moves. Chirm, chirp. Church-giebe-house, grave. Claes, clothes. Claithing, clothing. Clamb, climbed. Claught, catch up. Clinkin, smartly. Clinkumbell, the bell-ringer. Clymmynge, noisy. Cockernony, woman's hair gathered up with a band. Cofte, bought. Cog, basin. Cood, cud. Coost, cast. Corbie, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... chorusing together—feet clattered, passages echoed—it was a very Babel of noise and confusion. What strange beings we are! Not two hours before, I had said and felt that laughing was catching; now, although the merry chirp of youth mingled with it, I wished the whole party at the residence of an old gentleman whose name I care not to mention. May we not truly say of ourselves what the housemaid says of the missing article—"Really, sir, I don't know nothing at all about it?" A ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... and the party again ranged themselves on the sward. Each lady beside each gallant. "You, Mariana, if not fatigued," said the Queen, "shall take the lute and silence these noisy grasshoppers, which chirp about us with as much pretension as if they were nightingales. Sing, sweet subject, sing; and let it be the song our dear friend, Signor Visdomini, (I know not if this be the same Visdomini who, three years afterwards, with one of the Medici, conducted so gallant ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... his pity for the dumb helplessness of suffering animals was deep and true. He would lift the worm from his path lest a careless foot should crush it, and would encourage his "little sister grasshopper" to perch upon his hand, and chirp her song to his gentle ear. He tamed the fierce wolf of Gubbio, and fed the robins with crumbs from ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... whose head is in the headsman's hand sleepeth not anights. [583] However, fatigue and lack of sleep for four days past caused slumber get the mastery over him; [584] so he slept till break of morn, when he awoke at the chirp [585] of the sparrows. He arose and going to a stream there which flowed into the city, washed his hands and face; then, making the ablution, he prayed the morning-prayer and after returned and sat under the windows of the ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... and their straw hats were turned sociably towards one another, now and then, as they exchanged a syllable or two, and there was a mild luminousness of pleasure in the recesses of their pale-blue eyes. The evening darkened fast into night. The plaintive half-chirp, half-whistle of a tree-toad fell in monotonous repetition ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... I can hardly express how pleased I was to see him. I tell you, Robinson Crusoe don't make near enough of his loneliness. But here was interesting company. He looked at me and winked his eye from the front backwards, like a hen, and gave a chirp and began to peck about at once, as though being hatched three hundred years too late was just nothing. 'Glad to see you, Man Friday!' says I, for I had naturally settled he was to be called Man Friday if ever he was ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the chipping squirrel, or chipmunk, so named because his cry sounds like the chirp of little chickens. His method of dress is most unusual; he is brownish grey in colour, with five stripes of black and two of pale yellow running along the back of his coat; the throat and lower part of his ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... just over his head; and it had turned from lead to black. Many people were still on the ground grouped about the bases of the trees and holding on. Several such clusters were praying, and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting. A weird sound, rhythmical, faint as the faintest chirp of a far cricket, enduring but for a moment, but in the moment suggesting to him vaguely the thought of heaven and celestial music, came to his ear. He glanced about him and saw, at the base of another tree, a large cluster of people holding on by ropes and by one another. He could see their ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... grew the morning light, and more and more clearly perceptible became the greens, the browns, and the grays about them. Now the birds began to chatter and chirp, and squirrels ran along the branches of the trees, while a young rabbit bounced out from some bushes and went bounding along the road. This early morning life was something they had not seen in their camp, for it was all over before ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... man; he loves us; we need not fear him." 6. All the birds of the grove were soon his fast friends. They were on the watch for him, and would fly down from the green tree tops to greet him with their chirp. 7. When he had no work on the walks to do with his rake or his hoe, he took crusts of bread with him, and dropped the crumbs on the ground. Down they would dart on his head and feet to catch them as they fell from his hand. 8 He showed me how they ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... (beating time to music) was undertaken by a courtier. As this went on, the darkness of night began to diminish, and the hues of the flowers in the garden, and the countenance of each of the party, became gradually visible, while the birds themselves began to chirp in the trees. It was a pleasant dawn. Several presents were made to the company by the Imperial-mother, and to the Lord-Lieutenant a robe was given in addition, as an acknowledgment of his services as judge in the competition. ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... he whispered to the thousands of little birds that began to chirp in the bushes as soon as he came near. "Sleep a bit longer, ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... sympathy," the fluttering gentlemen chirp. "We admire his art and intellectual brilliancy, we all admire his art and intellectual brilliancy, his dazzling technique and rare rhythmical sense; but . . . he is totally devoid of sympathy." Dear! Dear! What is to be understood by this? ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... a great effort, and making a start away from the rail managed to drag his slippers as far as the binnacle. There he stopped again, exhausted and bored. From under the lifted glass panes of the cabin skylight near by came the feeble chirp of a canary, which appeared to give him some satisfaction. He listened, smiled faintly muttered "Dicky, poor Dick—" and fell back into the immense silence of the world. His eyes closed, his head hung low over the hot brass of the binnacle top. Suddenly he stood up with a jerk and said sharply ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything, be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder, however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their lives'! Wheels of all kinds have the same strange charm; mill-wheels, colliery-wheels, spinning-wheels, water-wheels, and wheeling ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... he had reached Central Park and was seated in the little summer house on a big pile of boulders near the Sixth Avenue entrance. The sun was rising. It was the first sunrise he had ever seen in New York. The effect on his imagination was startling. The red rays streaming through the park and the chirp of birds in the bushes were magic touches that transformed the world. He was back again in the South, where Nature is the one big fact of life, and the memories of the girl he had learned to love beside its ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... the hill, where the road became level again, and on the left as she looked toward the village, was the white house, surrounded by a garden and a hedge, which she supposed was Miss Ainslie's. A timid chirp came from the grass, and the faint, sweet smell of growing things floated in through the open window at the ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
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