"Bleat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ready with the rope, he gave the word, and the gate was opened; the cow ran in immediately, and, hearing her calf bleat, went into the cow-house, the door of which was shut upon her. A minute afterward Humphrey cried out to them to haul upon the ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... "Father, while the flocks are browsing dreams rise up within me; they make the heart sick with longing; the forests vanish, I hear no more the lamb's bleat or the rustling of the fleeces; voices from a thousand depths call me, they whisper, they beseech me, shadows lovelier than earth's children utter music, not for me though I faint while I listen. Father, why do I hear the things others hear not, voices ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... would rather have the cow." "But you have eaten the cow, and the pleasure is over." "Oh, but all the same, we would sooner have had the cow!" Gordon adds, "The other child of twelve years old, like her parents did not care a bit. A lamb taken from the flock will bleat, while here you see not the very slightest vestige of feeling." Such an incident shows how the human heart can, under certain circumstances, degenerate to being "without natural affection." It is not the people who are to blame, but their cruel conquerors. Not many miles away ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... the plain; from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance; and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and the business of town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses pleasant reflections ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... presence. When people wish to speak of what belongs to everyone alike they sometimes say, "It's as free as the air you breathe"—this wonderful air, which we cannot see, but which helps to make the sky so blue, without which no fire could burn, no robin sing to its mate, no lamb bleat after its mother, no merry voices of boys and girls at play be heard. God has indeed made it free to us; but let us never forget that we are, as His creatures, dependent upon Him ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... of their lives. They are not tucked away in reports of Commissions, and vaguely referred to as "too awful." Later on, perhaps, we shall be unreserved in our turn. But they do not talk of them with any babbling heat or bleat or make funny little appeals to a "public opinion" that, like the Boche, has gone underground. It occurs to me that this must be because every Frenchman has his place and his chance, direct or indirect, to diminish the number of Boches still alive. Whether he lies out in a sandwich of damp earth, ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... trees grew near brooks running down from the moors and the higher ground. The air was full of pleasant sounds prophesying of the coming summer. The rush, and murmur, and tinkle of the hidden watercourses; the song of the lark poised high up in the sunny air; the bleat of the lambs calling to their mothers—everything inanimate was full ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... gives a loose to war. In vengeance roused, the soldier fills his hand With sword and fire, and ravages the land, A thousand villages to ashes turns, In crackling flames a thousand harvests burns. 230 To the thick woods the woolly flocks retreat, And mixed with bellowing herds confus'dly bleat; Their trembling lords the common shade partake, And cries of infants sound in every brake: The listening soldier fixed in sorrow stands, Loth to obey his leader's just commands; The leader grieves, by generous pity swayed, To see his just commands so well obeyed. But now ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Their snow-white plumage flecked with crimson drops, I wept, and thought I turned towards you to weep: But you were gone; while rustling hedgerow tops Bent in a wind which bore to me a sound Of far-off piteous bleat of ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... "Isabel, my sweet! Red whortle-berries droop above my head, And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet; Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed 300 Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat Comes from beyond the river to my bed: Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom, And it shall comfort ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... arrived, moonlit and cloudless. A platform had been constructed in a comfortable and conveniently placed tree, and thereon crouched Mrs. Packletide and her paid companion, Miss Mebbin. A goat, gifted with a particularly persistent bleat, such as even a partially deaf tiger might be reasonably expected to hear on a still night, was tethered at the correct distance. With an accurately sighted rifle and a thumbnail pack of patience cards the sportswoman awaited the coming of ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... Venetians, the prophecy of the Erythraean sibyl:—"A gathering together of the powerful shall be made amidst the waves of the Adriatic, under a blind leader; they shall beset the goat—they shall profane Byzantium—they shall blacken her buildings—her spoils shall be dispersed; a new goat shall bleat until they have measured out and run over fifty-four feet nine inches and a half."[563] Dandolo died on the first day of June, 1205, having reigned thirteen years six months and five days, and was buried in the church of St. Sophia, at Constantinople. Strangely ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river-sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft, And gathering swallows ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... horses neighed, and the oxen lowed, The sheep's "Bleat! bleat!" came over the road; All seeming to say, with a quiet delight, "Good little girl, good ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... the Keeper of the Fires. As the man waved the animal back from the sacred ground, the goat lowered its head and threatened to charge, suddenly recollected its mate lying in the shade a few feet away, and began to bleat absent-mindedly. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... breeze like a billowy sea; the background of clear, pure, blue sky beyond completing a picture, the joyous freshness of which seemed almost heavenly to me in my extreme weakness. The air, too, was full of the chirping of millions of insects and lizards, the lowing of distant cattle, the bleat of sheep, the rifle-like crack of waggon-drivers' whips, the voices and laughter of men close beneath my window, and a multitude of ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... making a grimace. "Little fool. Everything you want—everything you've ever hoped for, and you go and bleat out 'no' like an idiotic little sheep. It's your one chance. Why don't you take it? Grab it? Snatch at it? What more ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... sheep that bleat so loudly Are his courtiers cross-bedight, Calves that strut before him proudly Seem each ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... for her carbine and drew it from its scabbard, but she was not quick enough to shoot it before it had jumped for the lamb it had been stalking. The coyote missed his prey, but the lamb, which had been feeding a little apart from the others, ran into the herd with a terrified bleat and the whole band fled ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... all, and grateful song around, Joined to the low of kine, and numerous bleat Of flocks thick-nibbling through the clovered vale: And shall the hymn be marred by thankless man, Most favored; who, with voice articulate, Should lead the chorus ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... mournful and tender. The old dog cut an ancient caper or two and then drew up sharp, ashamed of his levity, and walked a few dignified paces by his master's side. The sheep ran forward in little pattering rushes; they began to bleat, and ghostly flocks and herds answered them from under the sea. "Baa! Baaa!" For a time they seemed to be always on the same piece of ground. There ahead was stretched the sandy road with shallow puddles; the same soaking bushes showed on either side and the same shadowy palings. Then ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... would see to that to-morrow. Ma suggested that her sister-in-law's daughter might do, but Pa wouldn't have relatives at any price—blubbering for a smacking bestowed upon their daughters—he knew all about them, thank you. Let such sheep bleat elsewhere. No, give him strangers. He could be freer with them and get as many as he wished. An advertisement in The Daily Mail—"Wanted, young girls for trick cycling," followed by the address—fetched them the same day. The pavement before the house was blocked with white ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... to be free and abroad in the woods. He heard the wind singing in the pines. Their fine, penetrating aroma pervaded the air, and the rusty needles, covering the ground, muffled his tread. Once he paused—was that the bleat of a fawn, away down on the mountain's slope? He heard no more, and he walked on, looking about with his old alert interest. He was refreshed, invigorated, somehow consoled, as he went. O wise mother! he wondered if she foresaw this when she sent ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... her on eager feet, And therewithal an air so grave and mild, Coupled with such a deprecatory bleat Of injured confidence, that soon the Child Filled the lone shore with louder merriment, And e'en the Cyclops' heavy ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... flat-faced, heavy of foot, ruminant, taming their secular thoughts as they passed the licensed houses to some harmony with the sacred nature of their mission. The harvest fields lay half-garnered, smoke rose indolent and blue from cot-houses and farm-towns; very high up on the hills a ewe would bleat now and then with some tardy sorrow for her child. A most tranquil day, the very earth ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... Room of the Great Knife was now cleared of all but Cap'n Bill, who was tied in his frame, and of Trot and the moaning Boolooroo, who lay hidden behind the benches, the goat gave a victorious bleat and stood in the doorway to face any enemy that might appear. Trot had been as surprised as anyone at this sudden change of conditions, but she was quick to take advantage of the opportunities it afforded. First she ran with her rope to the goat, and as the animal could not see her, she ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... amazement. The curious-looking creature over there on the knoll was defying him, was challenging him. At this time of year his blood was hot and quick for any challenge. He gave vent to a short, harsh, explosive cry, more like a grumbling bleat than a bellow, and as unlike the buffalo's challenge as could well be imagined. Then he fell to thrashing the nearest bushes violently with his antlers. This, for some reason unknown to the mere human chronicler, seemed to be taken by Last Bull as a crowning insolence. His ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... punishment—that another partook of his anguish—that another was to die before him. Lead two sheep to the butcher's, two oxen to the slaughterhouse, and make one of them understand that his companion will not die; the sheep will bleat for pleasure, the ox will bellow with joy. But man—man, whom God created in his own image—man, upon whom God has laid his first, his sole commandment, to love his neighbor—man, to whom God has given a voice to express his thoughts—what is his first cry when he hears ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and long, The eyes that smiled through lavish locks, Home's cradle-hymn and harvest-song, And bleat of flocks. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in earnest protest against it. Roosting shags and waterfowl fly screaming away. In the swamp a bittern booms; and strange wailing cries come from the depths of the bush. On the farm dogs bark energetically, cattle bellow, horses neigh, sheep bleat, pigs grunt, ducks quack, and turkeys gobble. Frightful is the din that goes echoing among the woods. And then the outraged bridegroom gets out his gun, and commences rapid ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... spot some distance off the road, but Kitty's city-bred eyes could make out nothing. Just then there came a feeble bleat, and in a second Blue Bonnet had slipped from the saddle and handed ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... praise, and brag of her! I'll wait my proper time for laughter: Me by the nose she led, and now she'll lead you after. Her paramour should be an ugly gnome, Where four roads cross, in wanton play to meet her: An old he-goat, from Blocksberg coming home, Should his good-night in lustful gallop bleat her! A fellow made of genuine flesh and blood Is for the wench a deal too good. Greet her? Not I: unless, when meeting, To smash her windows ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... the direction of Iford Hill, Highdole Hill, or Telscombe village, which nestles three hundred feet high, over Piddinghoe. By day the waggons ply steadily between Lewes and the port, but other travellers are few. Once evening falls the world is your own, with nothing but the bleat of sheep and the roar of the French boat trains to recall ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... wold, Or bleat of lamb within its fold, Or cooing of love-legends old To dove-wives make not quiet less; Ecstatic chirp of winged thing, Or bubbling of the water-spring, Are sounds that more than silence bring ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... Arrangeh!" he suddenly exclaimed. "I's de double Grandes' Arrangeh whut is!" A faint bleat sounded from the darkness. "Shut up, Lily! Fo' I gits th'oo arrangin', yo' an' me bofe rides de mule ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... vituperation and, crowding about him, began to bleat their explanations and appeals. But he threw out his arms, pushed them back a safe distance from the panting Dominick and roared them into silence, brandishing his fists, as he would ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... mantle blithe Nature arrays. And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes, While birds warble welcome in ilka green shaw; But to me it's delightless—my ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway
... probable, but it is not demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you want it. It not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark of genius that shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in our national pasture that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one, among his friends and no takers, that he is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... something very unusual was in the air, the worthy Doctor repented him of his haste and, with what dignity he might, inquired between a bleat ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... started to chatter, and the parrots to screech, the horses to neigh and the pigs to squeak, the cows to moo and the donkeys to bray, the wild hyena to laugh and the little lambs to bleat. ...
— The Cruise of the Noah's Ark • David Cory
... still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room, and the street noises of New York came up to them—a loose chain flapping against the mud guard of a taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth Avenue street car; the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a motor horn; a piano in the apartment next door, ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... For the moon on my breast and the air on my limbs and the foam on my feet? For surely this earnest man has none Of the night in his soul, and none of the tune Of the waters within him; only the world's old wisdom to bleat. ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... nearly to the ground that she might lay her hands on his horns, which were very large; he then lifted her gently from the ground by raising his head. If she chanced to leave her flock feeding, as soon as they discovered she was gone, they all began to bleat most piteously, and would continue to do so till she returned; they would then testify their joy by rubbing their sides against her ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of Farce, who presides so particularly over all Irish affairs, put it into the lamb's head to bleat. The sound at first did not strike Tom Durfy as singular, they being near a high hedge, within which it was likely enough a lamb might bleat; but Biddy, shocked at the thought of being discovered in the fact of making her jaunting-cart a market-cart, reddened up to the ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... the Stranger, giving the lamb tenderly into my arms, and halting upon his staff; speaking warily and weightily as I never heard a man speak before or since. 'Nay; the lambkin must have fallen before I came by. But I heard the mother bleat, and I knew, by the sound, that she was in distress. Therefore I turned towards the crag upon which she stood, and, looking down, I perceived the lamb fallen among the brambles beneath ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... time, Let them caress some dearer son of rhyme; Let them, as far as decency permits, Without suspicion, play the fool with wits, 'Gainst fools be guarded; 'tis a certain rule, Wits are false things, there's danger in a fool. Let them, tho' modest, Gray more modest woo; Let them with Mason bleat, and bray, and coo; Let them with Franklin, proud of some small Greek, Make Sophocles disguis'd, in English speak; Let them with Glover o'er Medea doze; Let them with Dodsley wail Cleone's woes, Whilst he, fine feeling creature, all in tears, Melts, ...
— English Satires • Various
... Heavy chains weighed upon his feet. Behind him moved a face whose physiognomy indicated a lusty goat-nature. And I saw at times long, hairy hands seize assistingly the strings of the violin on which Paganini was playing. They often guided the hand which held the bow, and then a bleat-laugh of applause accompanied the melody, which gushed from the violin ever more full of sorrow and anguish. They were melodies which were like the song of the fallen angels who had loved the daughters of earth, and being exiled from the kingdom of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Henceforth, Strephon, cast away Crooks and pipes and ribbons so gay— Flocks and herds that bleat and low; Into ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... with wrong, with hatred rife; Oh, blessed night! with sober calmness sweet, The sad winds moaning through the ruined tower, The age-worn hind, the sheep's sad broken bleat— All nature groans opprest with toil and care, And wearied craves for rest, and love, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... taller than a rabbit, was bounding about through the grass, running around the prostrate body of its mother, and uttering its tiny bleat. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... his head, Does his loved floods and pastures scorn, Hates the shrill trumpet and the horn, Nor can his lifeless nostril please With the once-ravishing smell of all his dappled mistresses; The starving sheep refuse to feed, They bleat their innocent souls out into air; The faithful dogs lie gasping by them there; The astonished shepherd weeps, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... drowsily and sweet, Charming the woods to colors gay, And distant pastures send the bleat Of hungry lambs at break of day, Old Hermes' wings grow on my feet, And, good-by, ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... one is accustomed to regard as of a timid and inoffensive nature. When I set out at a brisk pace to walk to the house I have spoken of, in order to make some inquiries there, a few of the sheep that happened to be near began to bleat loudly, as if alarmed, and by and by they came hurrying after me, apparently in a great state of excitement. I did not mind them much, but presently a pair of horses, attracted by their bleatings, also seemed struck at my appearance, and came ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... to disappoint me. Saving my mother—whom I did not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether apart from what little humanity I had known until then—I had found that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by Fra Gervasio. Now here in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had discovered a phase of womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was driving me to conclude, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... himself, a lord and prince, will come out in his golden cope, and chant in the royal speech of that great empire which is no more. For ourselves, a mournful company, bereft of human speech, of the only speech that God would care to hear, what else can we do but low and bleat with the guileless friends who never scorn us, who, in winter-time will keep us warm in their stable, or cover us with their fleeces? We will live with dumb beasts, and be ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... hedges, close at hand, Build, brood, and sing the little birds, The happiest things in the green land, While sweetly feed the lowing herds, While softly bleat the roving sheep. Upon the green grass will I lie, A Summer's day, to think and sleep. Or see the clouds sail ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... pair. When his breakfast was ready she would sometimes call him with a low murmuring, and he would answer her with a little bleat; but those were almost the only sounds that were ever heard from them, except the rustling of the dry leaves around their feet. Yet they understood each other perfectly, and they were very happy together. There was little need of speech, for all they had to do the livelong ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... The bleat of the pacifist was heard in the land. Those who had once chanted in sanctimonious chorus, "He kept us out of war," now sang sentimental hymns invoking mercy and forgiveness for the crucifiers of children and the rapers of women, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... the sweet reed I tuned on the hill, My grief for the rough slopes of Sunnach so still, The wind in the fir tree and bleat of the ewe Are lost in the wild cry my heart makes for you. The brown floors I danced on, the sheds where I lay, Are gone from my mind like a wing in the bay: Dear lady, I'd herd the wild swans in the skies If they knew of lake water ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... Nell's scream, and a short, shrill bleat resounded at the same moment. Stas jumped towards Nell, and covering her with his own body, he aimed ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... came back from her deep-sea fishing she would go straight to their playground and call as a sheep calls for a lamb, and wait until she heard Kotick bleat. Then she would take the straightest of straight lines in his direction, striking out with her fore flippers and knocking the youngsters head over heels right and left. There were always a few hundred mothers hunting for their children through ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... me forcibly. The country people, those belonging to the Mornet, declare that at night one can hear talking going on in the sand, and then that one hears two goats bleat, one with a strong, the other with a weak voice. Incredulous people declare that it is nothing but the cry of the sea birds, which occasionally resembles bleatings, and occasionally human lamentations; but belated fishermen swear that they have met an old shepherd, whose head, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... aghast, fled faster than the wind, Nor deign'd, in three-score miles, to look behind; While every band for orders bleat in vain, And fall in slaughtered heaps upon ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... upon the two so far above the earth. They heard nothing of the bleat of the firing guns. Even the bursting of shrapnel went unheeded, save at a time when a shell exploded close by, and ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... of the most bigoted of zealots!—The fox can bleat like the lamb. At the very moment James the Second was uttering this mild expostulation, in his own heart he had anathematised the nation; for I have seen some of the king's private papers, which still exist; they consist of communications, chiefly by the most ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... my dressing-room's retreat My native wood-notes wilt and sag; Not there those raptures I repeat; My bellow now becomes a bleat (For reasons, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... and syrups sweet, O fountain of Bandusian onyx, To-morrow shall a goatling's bleat Mix with the sizz of ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... torrent's gentle dash Dance brighten'd the red clusters of the ash; Beneath whose boughs, by those still sounds beguil'd, Calm Pensiveness might muse herself to sleep; Till haply startled by some fleecy dam, 10 That rustling on the bushy cliff above With melancholy bleat of anxious love, Made meek enquiry for her wandering lamb: Such a green mountain 'twere most sweet to climb, E'en while the bosom ach'd with loneliness— 15 How more than sweet, if some dear friend should bless The adventurous toil, and up ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... though! There is a party of these young lambs as wide awake as heart can desire; half a dozen of them playing together, frisking, dancing, leaping, butting, and crying in the young voice, which is so pretty a diminutive of the full-grown bleat. How beautiful they are with their innocent spotted faces, their mottled feet, their long curly tails, and their light flexible forms, frolicking like so many kittens, but with a gentleness, an assurance of sweetness and innocence, which no kitten, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... dropped, k'whop! and scraped the buggy-shed, Leaving a tuft of woolly, foxy hair Under the sharp-end of a gate-hinge there. Then, all ignobly scrambling to his feet And whinneying a whinney like a bleat, He would pursue himself around the lot And—do the whole thing over, like as not!... Ah! what a life of constant fear and dread And flop and squawk and flight the chickens led! Above the fences, either side, were seen The neighbor-houses, ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... and sky; A silvery sheet, with spaces of soft hue; A trembling veil of gauze is stretched athwart The shadowy hill-sides and dark forest-flanks; A soothing quiet broods upon the air, And the faint sunshine winks with drowsiness. Far sounds melt mellow on the ear: the bark, The bleat, the tinkle, whistle, blast of horn, The rattle of the wagon-wheel, the low, The fowler's shot, the twitter of the bird, And even the hue of converse from ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... gasped, in a sort of bleat that drove the last of the pea-green mist out of that room ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... again," broke in Allison, looking very tall and efficient in his blue bath-robe. "You said you would talk business, and not bleat." ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... head was raised high upon the long neck as the animal stupidly looked here and there in search of the author of the disturbance. At last its eyes discovered tiny little Ajor, and then she hurled the stick at the diminutive head. With a cry that sounded not unlike the bleat of a sheep, the colossal creature shuffled into the water and ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... if in private he never hesitated to speak of the people in terms of contempt, on the platform he was a different man. Then he would assume a high-pitched voice, shrill, nasal, labored, solemn tones, a tremolo, a bleat, wide, sweeping, fluttering gestures like the beating of wings: exactly ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... earth lies lightly over his grey temples, and the earliest flowers of spring blossom above his dust.[41] The lovely lines of Leonidas,[42] in which Clitagoras asks that when he is dead the sheep may bleat over him, and the shepherd pipe from the rock as they graze softly along the valley, and that the countryman in spring may pluck a posy of meadow flowers and lay it on his grave, have all the tenderness of an English ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... domestic animals also, fear is much more active in the young than in the old. Nearly every farm boy has seen a calf but a day or two old, which its mother has secreted in the woods or in a remote field, charge upon him furiously with a wild bleat, when first discovered. After this first ebullition of fear, it usually settles down into the tame humdrum of ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... accompany the cows to their hill pasture. Often he could not be induced to quit poking his head into every pot and dish about the farm-yard. On these occasions he would wander uninvited with a little pleading, broken-backed bleat through every room in the house, looking for his mistress to let him suck her thumb or to feed him on oatcake or ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... marvel that there is one laugh left in her whole little shrunken body after it all; but there is, and the grin on her face reaches almost from ear to ear, as she clasps the biggest fairy in an arm very little stouter than a boy's bean blower, and hears the lamb bleat. Why, that one smile on that ghastly face would be thought worth his fifty dollars by the children's friend, could he see it. Pauline is the child of Swedish emigrants. She and Annie will not fight over their lambs and their dolls, not for many weeks. They ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... darting out as the stranger approaches the nest, looking like angry coals of brilliant fire, returning several times to the attack with the utmost velocity, at the same time uttering a curious, reverberating, sharp bleat, somewhat similar to the quivering twang of a dead twig, and curiously like the real bleat of some small quadruped. At other times the males may be seen darting high up in the air, and whirling about each other in great anger and with ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the woodpile and two little pickaninnies were gathering a basket of chips. Already the air was filled with the twilight sounds of the farm—the lowing of cattle, the bleating of calves at the cowpens, the bleat of sheep from the woods, and the nicker of horses in the barn. Through it all, Crittenden could hear the nervous thud of Raincrow's hoofs announcing rain—for that was the way the horse got his name, being as black as a crow and, as Bob claimed, always knowing ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... the habit of using a small instrument which imitates the bleat of the young fawn, with which they lure the doe within range of their rifles. The young fawn gives out no scent upon its track until it is sufficiently grown to make good running, and instinct teaches the mother that this wise provision of nature ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... my gendarmes took off the pictures, nicely packed, and addressed to "Mr. the Director of my Imperial Palace of the Louvre, at Paris. This side uppermost." The Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Italians, &c., should be free to come and visit my capital, and bleat with tears before the pictures torn from their native cities. Their ambassadors would meekly remonstrate, and with faded grins make allusions to the feeling of despair occasioned by the absence of the beloved works of art. Bah! I would offer them a pinch of snuff ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The pastoral bleat, the drone of bees, The flail-beat chiming far away, The cattle-low at shut of day, The voice of God in leaf ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... bell, book, and candle,—candle, book, and bell,— Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell! Anon you shall hear a hog grunt, a calf bleat, and an ass bray, Because it ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... some twenty minutes; and Tinker's skill, sureness, and lightness of movement was the prettiest sight. Sometimes, with a snorting bleat, Billy would turn sharply at the end of his charge, and charge again; then the concentration on the matter in hand, which his father had so carefully cultivated in Tinker, proved a most fortunate ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... praising and praising such low songs raising that no one can hear them but the sun so near them and the sheep that bite them but do not fright them are the quietest sheep awake or asleep with the merriest bleat and the little lambs are the merriest lambs forgetting to eat for the frolic in their feet and the lambs and their dams are the whitest sheep with the woolliest wool for the swallow to pull when he makes his nest for her he loves best and they shine like snow in the grasses that grow ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... back, mounted, and made a wide detour until she struck the trail above. Already she could hear the distant bleat of sheep which told her that the herd was entering the pass. Recklessly she urged her pony forward, galloping into the saddle between the peaks without regard to the roughness of the boulder-strewn ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... he sang like a bird in the summer! And, if sometimes you fancied a bleat, That, too, was the voice of the shepherd, And not of ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... year, I hear the young lambs bleat, The clamouring birds i' the copse I hear, I hear the waving wheat, Together laid ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... the eye of an angel be allowed to rest upon this paper if it were not fit that it should be so?" I demanded in my anger. "Colonel, am I to hear you bleat about doves and lovers when a glance of your eye ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... whatever rout they might take to travellers rest and blaize the trees well as they proceeded and wait at that place untill our arrivall with the party. the hunters as usual wer dispatched early this morning. the does now having their fawns the hunters can bleat them up and in that manner kill them with more facility and ease. the indians pursue the game so much on horseback in this neighbourhood that it is very shye. our hunters killed 4 deer and a bear today. at 4 P.M. Drewyer Shannon and Whitehouse returned. Drewyer brought with him three ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... glorious," he thought; and then he gave quite a start, for the goat beside him suddenly set up a loud bleat and began to advance farther beneath the glacier, its pattering hoofs on the stone sounding ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... revolver and fired shots over the greyhounds' heads, hoping to scare them into submission, but they seemed to draw fresh stimulus from each report, and yelped and bounded faster. A little more and the end would be. Then we saw a touching sight. The hindmost fawn let out a feeble bleat of distress, and the mother, heeding, dropped back between. It looked like choosing death, for now she had not twenty feet of lead. I wanted Eaton to use his gun on the foremost hound, when something unexpected happened. The flat was crossed, the Blacktail reached a great high butte, ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... went, and his eyelids blinked strangely, like the flutter of a sere leaf against the wall. There came a roar of voices, and, in the tumult, the Captain's sword flashed quickly, and fell. Then, with a broken cry like a sheep's bleat, the great seamed face fell separate from the body, and a fountain of blood rose into the air from the severed neck, and splashed heavily upon the sanded ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... strange to know When we return yon speckled herring-gulls Will still be wheeling, dipping, flashing there? We shall not find a fairer land afar Than those thyme-scented hills we leave behind! Soon the young lambs will bleat across the combes, And breezes will bring puffs of hawthorn scent Down Devon lanes; over the purple moors Lavrocks will carol; and on the village greens Around the May-pole, while the moon hangs low, The boys and girls of England merrily swing In country footing through ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... could bleat like buttered pease! But bleating of my lungs hath caught the itch, And are as mangy as the Irish seas, That doth ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... the day-star fades from sight, And morning's softest tint of rose and gold Tinges the east and tips the mountain-tops. The silent village stirs with waking life, The bleat of goats and low of distant herds, The song of birds and crow of jungle-cocks Breathe softest music through ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... the oxen lowed, The sheep's "bleat, bleat!" came over the road; All seeming to say, with a quiet delight, "Good little girl, good ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... resembling the low notes of a piano with a pressure on the pedal. It increased and became louder, coming from the road which passed the house; it was caused by a very large flock of sheep driven slowly. The individual 'baa' of each lamb was so mixed, as it were, with the bleat of its fellow that the swelling sound took a strange, mysterious tone; a voice that seemed to speak of trouble, and perplexity, and anxiety for rest. Hilary, as a farmer, must of course go out to see whose they were, and I went with him; but before he ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... musical point of view, have their wing feathers or tails peculiarly developed and stiffened, and are able to produce with them a strange snapping or cracking sound. Thus several species of snipe make drumming or "bleating" noises—something like the bleat of a goat—with their narrowed tails as they descend in flight.[74] Magpies have a still more curious method of call, by rapping on dry and sonorous branches, which they use not only to attract ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Shafto, doubled up in a cramped position on a machan, felt painfully stiff and was obliged to deny himself the comfort of a cigarette. There was no sound beyond the bleat of the victim—unwittingly summoning its executioner, the buzz of myriads of insects, the bass booming of frogs and the stealthy, mysterious movements of night birds and small animals. Then by degrees the moon waned and the stars faded—though the sky was still light. It ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... forcibly. The country people, those belonging to the Mornet, declare that at night one can hear talking going on in the sand, and also that two goats bleat, one with a strong, the other with a weak voice. Incredulous people declare that it is nothing but the screaming of the sea birds, which occasionally resembles bleatings, and occasionally human lamentations; but belated fishermen swear that they have met an old shepherd, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Peter her hand, promising to go with him, and then making her way through the goats she once more clasped Snowflake round the neck, saying in a gentle soothing voice, "Sleep well, Snowflake, and remember that I shall be with you again to-morrow, so you must not bleat so sadly any more." Snowflake gave her a friendly and grateful look, and then went leaping joyfully ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... his mouth open in a curious quiver, as if he, too, had thoughts of Mr. Vyse, had seen round, through, over, and beyond Mr. Vyse, had weighed Mr. Vyse, grouped him, and finally dismissed him as having no possible bearing on the subject under discussion. That bleat of Tibby's infuriated Helen. But Helen was now down in the dining-room preparing a speech about political economy. At times her voice could be heard declaiming ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... imperative call, "Mamma!" so shrill and constraining, reaching so far across the dark water, that a hand before his lips smothered its iteration in his throat. "Bee-have!" Holvey hissed in his ear, and as the child struggled into a sitting posture his involuntary bleat, "Mamma!" was so meekened by fear and plaintive recollection and submissive helplessness that it could scarcely have been distinguished a ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... frantically to build a net of something around his bed, while a wet, thick thing flopped and drooled beyond the door, apparently immune to the attacks of the hospital staff. There were shouting orders involving the undine. The salamander in Dave's chest crept deeper and seemed to bleat at each cry of the ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... seems; He'll no way hide, whateer his fate may be, Then to his mouth he sets a trumpet clear, And clearly sounds, so all the pagans hear. Throughout the field rally his companies. From Occiant, those men who bray and bleat, And from Argoille, who, like dogs barking, speak; Seek out the Franks with such a high folly, Break through their line, the thickest press they meet Dead from that shock they've ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... ye the bulls, with how lordly a flank they besprawl on the broom! —Yet obey the uxorious yoke and are tamed by Dione her doom. Or behear ye the sheep, to the husbanding rams how they bleat to the shade! Or behear ye the birds, at the Goddess' command how they sing unafraid!— Be it harsh as the swannery's clamour that shatters the hush of the lake; Be it dulcet as where Philomela holds darkling the poplar awake, So melting her soul into ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... edge of the mesa. They separated as the rider swept up. One terror-stricken lamb, bleating piteously, hesitated on the very edge of the chasm. Fadeaway swung his hat and laughed as the little creature reared and leaped out into space. There had been but little noise—an occasional frightened bleat, a drumming of hoofs on the mesa, and they ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... opportunity, while the bird was in the air, I hastened across the field, and stationed myself against a small cedar. He was still clicking high overhead, but soon alighted silently within twenty yards of where I was standing, and commenced to "bleat," prefacing each yak with a fainter syllable which I had never before been near enough to detect. Presently he started once more on his skyward journey. Up he went, in a large spiral, "higher still and higher" till the cedar cut off my view for an instant, after which I could not again get ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... let her wash thy dainty feet With such salt things as tears, or with rude hair Dry them, soft Pharisee, that sit'st at meat With him who made her such, and speak'st him fair. 340 Leaving God's wandering lamb the while to bleat Unheeded, shivering in the pitiless air: Thou hast made prisoned virtue show more wan And haggard than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Bleat out afresh, ye hills! ye mossy rocks, Retain the sound; the broad responsive low, Ye valleys raise; for the great Shepherd reigns, And his unsuffering kingdom ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... dread the raven in the sky; Night and day thou art safe,—our cottage is hard by. Why bleat so after me? why pull so at thy chain? Sleep—and at break of day I will come to ...
— Phebe, the Blackberry Girl - Uncle Thomas's Stories for Good Children • Anonymous
... Press, ending up with the remark that if we would notify our boat he would hand us any directions which he might think it proper to give us at the moment of starting. A second question from us failed to elicit any answer at all, save a plaintive bleat from his wife to the effect that her husband was in a very violent temper already, and that she hoped we would do nothing to make it worse. A third attempt, later in the day, provoked a terrific crash, and a subsequent message from the Central Exchange that Professor Challenger's receiver ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trench in which I had been lying. From time to time a wall fell in the village, and the cattle, scared away by the battle, began to resume confidence and return. I heard a goat bleat in a neighboring stable. A great shepherd's dog wandered fearfully among the heaps of dead. The horse, seeing him, neighed in terror—he took him for a wolf—and the ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... thought she saw a poor man standing in the darkness outside; but it was no such thing, only a bear, who poked his thick black head through the door. Rose-red screamed aloud and sprang back in terror, the lamb began to bleat, the dove flapped its wings, and Snow-white ran and hid behind her mother's bed. But the bear began to speak, and said: "Don't be afraid: I won't hurt you. I am half frozen, and only wish to warm myself a little." "My poor bear," said the mother, "lie down by the fire, ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... was out on such a night—on some errand, or in at a neighbour's—to crouch in the hedge and leap silently out upon her was huge delight; and it was well worth braving the grim possibilities of the hedges in order to extort from her the anger in the bleat of terror which, as a rule, was all that her paralysed heart permitted, as she turned ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... can Black Nanny be?" muttered Ready, stopping a little while; at last he heard a bleat, in a small copse of brush wood, to which he directed his steps, followed by the dogs. "I thought as much," said he, as be perceived Nanny lying down in the copse with two new-born kids at her side. "Come, my little fellows, we must find some shelter ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... contagious merriment. "Come thou home now," he said to Ambrose; "my good woman hath been in a mortal fright about thee, and would have me come out to seek after thee. Such are the women folk, Master Headley. Let them have but a lad to look after, and they'll bleat after him like an old ewe that has ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and the surf breaks over Square Rock. All round the horizon, landward as well as seaward, the view is shut in by a mist. Sometimes I have a dim sense of the continent beyond, but no more distinct than the thought of the other world to the unenlightened soul. The sheep bleat in their desolate pasture. The wind shakes the house. A loon, seeking, I suppose, some quieter resting-place than on the troubled waves, was seen swimming just now in the cove not more than a hundred yards from the hotel. Judging by the pother which this "half a gale" makes ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... longshore sailormen who endeavour to temper its fury to the shorn landsman by palming off a final verse, which gives one to understand that the previous stanzas have been only 'Johnny's' little fun, and which makes him bleat: ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry |
