"Clucking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Juliana left off clucking, and smiled sarcastically. "She isn't breakin' her heart after you, Mr. Brian, at any rate," she remarked. "She wasn't long in getting over ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... mistake is not likely to be made again. After a while one gets to know the hens personally, and to know the noise which means that they have just laid. Sometimes, if a hen is going to lay just as you come to her nest, she will run off clucking and screaming and lay the ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... morning about eight, to find her gone, but as I was dressing by the window I saw her below me in the garden, busy with some hens that were clucking all ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... four hens of the ridiculously small native breed. These rode atop the loads: their feet were tied to the cords and there they swayed and teetered and balanced all day long, apparently quite happy and interested. At each new camp site they were released and went scratching and clucking around among the tents. They lent our temporary quarters quite a settled air of domesticity. We named the cocks Gaston and Alphonse and somehow it was rather fine, in the blackness before dawn, to hear these little birds crowing stout-heartedly against the great African wilderness. Neither ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... What a clucking of surprise there would be when it was told that not from any hothouse whatever, but from the depths of the ocean came the full, ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... imagination are imbedded.[351] He wrote too much to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout "The Prelude" and "The Excursion" he seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... she said, not to herself but to an old blue hen who was scratching around the hollyhocks, clucking loudly. The hen had a motherly air, having launched so many families, and Mrs. Buck felt instinctively she ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... Mavis had frequented music halls, she would have recognised the woman as the original of a type frequently seen on the boards of those resorts, played by male impersonators. Directly she saw Mavis, Mrs Bale hurried to the bedside and seized the baby, to dandle it in her arms, the while she made a clucking noise not unlike ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... day and the doors of the carriage house and the big door of the barn were wide open. Mary-'Gusta could hear the hens clucking and the voices of people talking. The voices were two: one was that of Mrs. Hobbs, the housekeeper, and the other belonged to Mr. Abner Hallett, the undertaker. Mary-'Gusta did not like Mr. Hallett's voice; she liked neither it nor its owner's ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... there's a heap o' perfumes 'raound that ye can't buy at a flower-store and cork up in a bottle. Well, I guess—Git up, Bess!" and he flopped the reins once more along the ridges and hollows of the mare's back while he encouraged her to renewed efforts with that peculiar clucking sound heeded only by certain ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... worshippers clad in rainbow hues crowd round the base of the volcano, while the priests of Siva, in motley robes of brilliant patchwork, adorned with cabalistic tracery in white, ascend the swaying rungs, bearing their struggling victims, bleating, crowing, and clucking in mortal terror. Stalwart arms toss the black goat with accurate aim to an assistant priest, who passes on his clever "catch" to a third expert in the task of hoodwinking Siva and depriving him of his lawful prey. Sundry ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... place was a human foot and crumbling indications of a boot, but no signs of a body. A hay rick, half ashes, stood near the centre of the gorge. Workmen who dug about it to-day found a chicken coop, and in it two chickens, not only alive but clucking happily when they were released. A woman's hat, half burned; a reticule, with a part of a hand still clinging to it; two shoes and part of a dress told the story of one unfortunate's death. Close at hand a ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... before him, the deacon would not take two—that is, on the same night. On frosty nights the humane Negro prowler would warm the end of the plank and put it up under the cold claws of chickens roosting in a tree; a drowsy hen would step on to the comfortable board, softly clucking her gratitude, and the prowler would dump her into his bag, and later into his stomach, perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure—his liberty—he was not committing any sin that God would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the gale gusts or snow squalls or driving tropic rain. And the vision he saw was of farm and farm-house and straw-thatched outbuildings, of children playing in the sun, and the good wife at the door, of lowing kine, and clucking fowls, and the stamp of horses in the stable, of his father's farm next to him, with, beyond, the woodless, rolling land and the hedged fields, neat and orderly, extending to the crest of the smooth, soft hills. It was his vision and ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... deserted. Some instinct told me she was not there. The little flower-beds looked shaggy, grass-grown, and uncared for. In the centre, among the geraniums, phlox-beds, and French marigolds, sat a dirty-white hen, clucking and calling a brood of dirty-white chickens. The box-bordered gravelled paths, which Wynne, in spite of his drunkenness, used to keep always so neat, were covered with leaves, shaken by the wind from the trees surrounding the garden. One of the dark green shutters ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... expectation which the faces of the three expressed had lasted for several minutes, the two maids re-entered, accompanied by their master, the Justice. The first was holding aloft a roomy basket of wickerwork, in which some hens were anxiously clucking and flapping their wings. She put it down in front of the Sexton, who ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... is about manor-houses: maids in faded chintz gowns flitted to and fro; house-serfs sauntered through the mud, stood still and scratched their spines meditatively; the constable's horse, tied up to a post, lashed his tail lazily, and with his nose high up, gnawed at the hedge; hens were clucking; sickly turkeys kept up an incessant gobble-gobble. On the steps of a dark crumbling out-house, probably the bath-house, sat a stalwart lad with a guitar, singing with some ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... clothe. Cleek, to snatch. Cleekit, linked arms. Cleg, gadfly. Clink, a sharp stroke; jingle. Clink, money, coin. Clink, to chink. Clink, to rhyme. Clinkin, with a smart motion. Clinkum, clinkumbell, the beadle, the bellman. Clips, shears. Clish-ma-claver, gossip, taletelling; non-sense. Clockin-time, clucking- (i. e., hatching-) time. Cloot, the hoof. Clootie, cloots, hoofie, hoofs (a nickname of the Devil). Clour, a bump or swelling after a blow. Clout, a cloth, a patch. Clout, to patch. Clud, a cloud. Clunk, to make ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, some-times making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too, too: all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile. Generally when he had concluded a period, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... into the reach. He was safely away and, gazing into the faces of the Portuguese, he grimly reflected that for impressed men they seemed fully as glad to be away as he. They rowed now without further monition, clucking, each to himself, little prayers for their safe deliverance ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... absolute fecundity. The grass was deep and green and lush. The sweet peas and the roses and the morning-glories, and the honeysuckles on the lattice, hung ranks deep in blossoms. A hundred flocks of fowl ran clucking and chirping about the yard. Across the lawn a mother swine led her brood of squeaking and squealing young. A half-hundred puppies, toddlers or half-grown, romped about, unused fragments of the great hunting pack of the owner of this kingdom. Life, perhaps short, perhaps rude, ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... A clucking and grunting concourse of fowls and pigs shared the farmyard; blue pigeons claimed the roof; and now, in the westering light, with slow foot, sweet breath, and swelling udder, many kine, red as the ripe horse-chestnut, followed ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... vesicles or blisters forming on the mucous membrane of the mouth, lips, between and above the claws and the region of the udder. The inflammation of the mouth and feet may be very painful. Long strings of saliva may dribble from the mouth and collect about the lips (Fig. 106). A smacking or "clucking" sound is produced when the animal moves its jaws and lips. The severe pain resulting from the inflammation of the mouth and feet, and the difficulty in moving about and eating and drinking, ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... an immediate answer ready. Her brow was always unruffled, her black shining hair brushed neatly back and parted down the middle, her large flat face always composed and placid, and her voice never raised above a whisper. The only sign that she ever gave of disturbance was a little clucking noise that she made in her mouth like an aroused hen. Peter's time in the little pink sitting-room was sometimes exceedingly short and he used to make the most of it by shooting questions at the good lady at an astonishing rate, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... way to a small room on the left of the narrow hall, which I supposed to be her parlor, though it was at the back of the house, and we passed the closed door of another apartment which apparently enjoyed a view of the quince-trees. This one looked out upon a small woodshed and two clucking hens. But I thought it very pretty, until I saw that its elegance was of the most frugal kind; after which, presently, I thought it prettier still, for I had never seen faded chintz and old mezzotint engravings, framed in varnished autumn leaves, disposed in so graceful a fashion. Miss Spencer ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... "The sun is clucking, girls," announced Walter. "She may set at any time. Is there aught to eat at the Mote? Let us thither. We intended to go to ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... taken himself off, with a mind which was too intent upon the high things of antiquity to stoop to consider the four-pence which he owed for bed and board. It was the shrill out-cry of the landlady when she found her loss, and the clucking of the hens, which had streamed in through the open door, that first broke in upon the slumbers of ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... head as she unfolded the fine linen things, and uttered a sort of little clucking sound, meant to show her disapproval of ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... it was a picture of woe. But the next day a neighboring rooster got to looking through the fence from the alley, and trying to flirt with her. At first she was indignant, and seemed to tell him he ought to go about his business, and leave her alone, but the dude kept clucking, and pretty soon the widowed hen edged up towards the fence, and asked him to come in, but the hole in the fence was too small for him, and then the chickens went out in the alley, and the hen followed ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... teased his sister for a long time in vain, to play out of doors with him, the spoiled boy hissed at her, and said, "You are an ugly old cat!" Then slamming the door after him, he went into the barn-yard, where the screaming of the pigs, the gabble of the geese, and the clucking of the hens, soon proclaimed that he was venting his ill-temper on the dumb creatures who had their home there. Poor Charlie! the indulgence of his mother, and the almost constant absence of his father from home, had made him a very unhappy, mischievous boy, if, ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... to refresh your parched mouth. And you shall have peace, and rest, and quiet walks in stately woods; and you shall sit in the barn upon clover hay, and see the dear children play about and rejoice in your presence. You shall see us feed the hennipennies, and hear that most quiet sound of their clucking and murmuring. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... flying away or lured back again from its perilous flight. Thus in Java when a child is placed on the ground for the first time (a moment which uncultured people seem to regard as especially dangerous), it is put in a hen-coop and the mother makes a clucking sound, as if she were calling hens. And in Sintang, a district of Borneo, when a person, whether man, woman, or child, has fallen out of a house or off a tree, and has been brought home, his wife or other kinswoman goes as speedily ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... hawthorn-trees with immense masses of tangled underwood between, brambles and woodbine twisted and matted together, impervious above but hollow beneath; under these they could hear the bush-hens running to and fro and scratching at the dead leaves which strewed the ground. Sounds of clucking deeper in betrayed the situation of ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... There were twenty large chickens in one big box, and twenty-seven small ones that had been brought in a long box by themselves. Well, Charlie and one of the men got the boxes down and opened them. At once the four or five mother hens clucked and scratched and kept on clucking until the little chicks were let out, when every one of them ran to its own mother, and each hen strutted off with her own brood. That is the absolute truth, but is not all. When night came the chickens went back to their boxes to roost—all but the small ones. Those were left outside with their ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... shooting a few times. Copple could not keep up with him, but evidently had a few shots himself. R.C. chased most of the flock across several small canyons, till he came to a deep canyon. Here he hoped to make a killing when the turkeys ran up the far slope. But they flew across! And he heard them clucking over there. He crossed, and went on cautiously. Once he saw three turkey heads sticking above a log. Wise old gobblers! They protected their bodies while they watched for him. He tried to get sidewise to them but they ran off. Then he followed ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... exactly the same of the captain and Violet," pursued Betty, in a lower tone, and glancing toward that couple, as they sat side by side on the opposite sofa—Violet with her babe in her arms, the captain clucking and whistling to it, while it cooed and laughed in his face—Violet's ever-beautiful face more beautiful than its wont, with its expression of exceeding love and happiness as her glance rested now upon her husband ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... "Bap, bap, bap! Shabaz!" and queer gurgling clucking of the throat, and a sonorous rumble from the wide, low wheels, the driver drove the tonga on into the moonlight. Barlow had saddled his horse and thrown his blanket loosely behind the saddle. The air was chilling, but his sheepskin ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... decided what to give Peter on Christmas morning, and it seemed too bad, for when Billy and Betty went out to the barn each creature seemed to be enjoying the tree very much. The hens were clucking, Bessie was neighing, and Shep was walking round and round the tree, smelling of his bones. And there sat Peter, right under the tree, and looking up into its ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... conjectured—erroneously as it happened—hunger for warmth or food. Under these circumstances what could be done by a woman who was conscious of owning a redly-glowing hearth with a big black pot, fairly well filled, clucking and bobbing upon it? To possess such wealth as this, and think seriously of withholding a share from anybody who urges the incontestable claim of wanting it, is a mood altogether foreign to Lisconnel, where the responsibilities of property are, no doubt, ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... hens, just as usual, walking with measured step, scratching and picking in the muck, darting suddenly to one side with an elevated wing, clucking, chattering, jabbering endlessly about nothing. They did not seem to mind him as he stood in the open door. But the rooster, in his oriental iridescent plumage, jumped upon a fence-post and crowed defiantly, in warning that this was his preserve. They ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... broken scythe lay to one side amid the straggling ailanthus shoots; near the wood-pile there was a wheelbarrow half filled with chips, and at a little distance the axe was poised upon a rotten log. From the small coops beside the hen-house came an anxious clucking as the fluffy yellow chickens strayed beneath the uneven edges of their pointed prisons and made independent ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... from?" it replied, "From Marignan." "To whom do you belong?" "To a Portuguese." The Prince then asked, "What do you do there?" it answered, "I look after the chickens." The Prince, laughing, exclaimed, "You look after the chickens!" "Yes," says Poll, "I can, I know very well how to do it," clucking at the same time like a hen calling her brood. We are told also of a parrot that learned to repeat the Apostles' Creed quite perfectly, and on that account was bought by ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... were clucking peacefully in their corner of Uncle Ebeneezer's dooryard, and the newly acquired bossy cow mooed unhappily in her improvised stable. Harlan had christened the cow "Maud" because she insisted upon ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... garnished at the back with a mane of greasy black hair, which fell down upon his shoulders. In his hand, which was almost black, he held a short stick of palm-wood, and with an air of extravagant mystery, mingled with cunning, he crept round the room close to the walls, alternately whistling and clucking, bending his head, as if peering at the floor, then lifting it to gaze up at the ceiling. He had shot a keen glance at Mrs. Armine as he came in, but he seemed at once to forget her, and to be wholly intent upon ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... these thousands of birds were every now and then so penetrating that he was not able to hear what she said. The noisy laughter of Lina was alone sufficiently shrill to ring out with its joyous note above every kind of clucking, chirping, ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... for Hal and Ned, and was told that they had gone out after a flock of wild turkeys that had been heard clucking in the pecan trees, not far from camp. They had taken their guns with them, and expected to be ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... upon the black joists and window-sills. Fowls of the midden, new brought from other parts to make up the place of those that had gone to the kail-pots of Antrim and Athole, stalked about with heads high, foreign to this causied and gravelled country, clucking eagerly for meat I made my way amid the bird of the sea and the bird of the wood and common bird of the yard with a divided mind, seeing them with the eye for future recollection, but seeing them not Peats were at every close-mouth, at ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... any," he said, swinging the cultivator back into place and clucking to Solomon to go ahead. "I can't eat green rocks, you know, and ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umbellus), which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... said Mrs. Grayson softly. They both sat silent, looking into the fire. Through the open door, the hens could be heard pecking and clucking in the yard, and the rushing of a beck swollen by the rain, on the fell-side. Presently the farmer's ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bees—there, under that old elm you may see their hives, filled, too, with luscious honey. There is the well, with its old sweep, and the "moss-covered bucket," too; and look at the corn-crib, and the old barn—and what a noisy set of fowls around it, cackling, clucking and crowing, as if they owned the soil; and how the pigs are scampering through the clover-field; ah! the little wretches, they have stolen a march, or rather a caper; at them, old Jowler, at them, my fine fellow, you will soon turn ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... acquainted, Westerfelt," he began, stroking his chin downward and letting his lips meet with a clucking sound, also another professional habit; "but, you'd find, ef you knew me better, that I never beat the devil round the stump, as the feller said, an' I'm above board." He paused for a moment; then he kicked a rotten spot on the log with the ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... Jung himself, seated in the place of the mahout, guiding the elephant which he bestrode very cleverly. When silence was required he made a peculiar clucking noise with his tongue; whereupon these docile creatures immediately became still and motionless: one would drop the tuft of grass which he was tearing up, another would stop instantly from shaking the dust out of the roots which he was preparing to eat, others left off chewing ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... up in my bed of straw and looked round me. The sunshine was streaming through a small window and under the door, but the door was closed, the bar was very still and quite empty save for my own presence, and the crowing of a cock and the clucking of hens were at first the only sounds that reached me from outside. Then I became conscious of a soft and regular "swish," rising and falling constantly and perpetually, and I remembered the sea close at hand, and a shiver of gratitude ran through me to think ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... be kissed at. Old Nanna brought Baby John and put him on his grandmother's knee. Dorothy and Nicholas went off with Mary-Nanna to the party. Michael forgot all about playing with himself. He stayed where he was, drawn by the spectacle of Grannie and the Aunties. Grannie was clucking and chuckling to Baby John as she had clucked and chuckled to her own babies long ago. Her under lip made itself wide and full; it worked with an in and out movement very funny and interesting to Michael. The movement meant that Grannie chuckled ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... on it for more'n sixty years and maybe a thousand years before that! Oh, you know! Look how it went with those old-timers. The last one of the Seven got it. Look how it happens with old man Loony Honeycutt, clucking and chuckling and stepping up and down in his shadow all the time; gone nuts from just smelling of it! Look what happens to me, all stove up here." He paused and then spat out venomously: "Oh, it'll get Swen Brodie and it'll get you, ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... he went forth again, Mrs. Barlow clucking after him like a disgruntled fowl, he found young Pitt smothered in a crowd of scared, half-dressed townsfolk—mostly women—who had come hastening for news of how the battle had sped. The news he gave them was to be read in the lamentations with which they disturbed ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... from his neighbor. There was a second of absolute quiet after the pleasant voice finished the short invocation; then a shoving of benches, a rattle of dishes; and the meal progressed amid peals of laughter and an incessant clucking ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... for so long that the thing was to be noticed in my manner. He made no comment upon me, however. Indeed almost the only time he spoke during our passage was to voice his astonishment at not having been able to procure the London Times at the press-stalls along the way. His host made clucking noises of sympathy at this. He had, he said, already warned his lordship that America was ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... an excellent meal: fish from the river, fowl from the poultry-yard—we heard the clucking of the doomed hen, and the indignant remonstrances of her companions—a capital omelette, and country cheese and butter. With these comfortable things we had a bottle of honest wine of unknown vintage, but palatable and generous; and when the meal was over we sat and ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... line of dark Spanish oaks from which the sharp pointed acorns were dropping, darkest green oaks, shut out the shore. A thousand starlings were flung up into the air out of these oaks, as if an impatient hand had cast them into the sky; then down they fell again, with a ceaseless whistling and clucking; up they went and down they came, lost in the deep green foliage as if they had dropped in the sea. The long level of the wheat-field plain stretched out from my feet towards the far-away Downs, so level that the first hedge shut off the fields ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... followed the riders, jolting along in the grub-wagon, awkwardly driving, with much clucking and pidgin-English, Old Tom and Baldy hitched to the heavy, canvas-covered vehicle with its "box-kitchen" and mess-board protruding gawkily ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... in summer I have sometimes amused myself with imitating the violent chirping or clucking of young birds, in order to observe what different species were round me; for such sounds at such a season in the woods are no less alarming to the feathered tenants of the bushes than the cry of fire or murder in the street is to the inhabitants of a large city. ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... announces a case of two hens, who by joint efforts hatched one chick. They have since, for some weeks, been parading the yard, each clucking and manifesting all the anxiety and care of a true mother over this one. The hens never quarrel, or show the least appearance of ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... signal, drily remarking that he could not leave the barn door without the old hen clucking ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... croaking of frogs, crowing of cocks, cackling of hens, calling of partridges, chanting of swans, chattering of jays, peeping of chickens, singing of larks, creaking of geese, chirping of swallows, clucking of moorfowls, cucking of cuckoos, bumbling of bees, rammage of hawks, chirming of linnets, croaking of ravens, screeching of owls, whicking of pigs, gushing of hogs, curring of pigeons, grumbling of cushat-doves, howling ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... child whom anybody would have hurried to comfort and humor. "I want to do what's right, I'm sure;" and her red under lip began to tremble and the water to gather in her eyes. She sat down to hear the rest of the lecture, but her mother stopped short. Presently, when the chickens came clucking, she went to mix their meal as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... blackbird is one of those inscrutable mysteries peculiar to the naming of birds which are so frequently called precisely what they are not. In spite of the compliment implied in associating the name of one of our finest songsters with it, the rusty blackbird has a clucking call as unmusical as it is infrequent, and only very rarely in the spring does it pipe a note that even suggests the sweetness of ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... seated himself in a chair and appeared to meditate. Again his hands were clasped about his knees and his beady eyes fixed on space. For fully fifteen minutes he sat thus; then, with a little clucking sound, he leaped to his feet and hurried into the ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... and vivid passages of its singularly picturesque history. The subordinate figures on the canvas have accordingly an interest greater than what arises from their commonplace individualities and their meagre part in the action—like barndoor fowls pecking and clucking beside larger bipeds in a walled yard steeped in sunlight. But the sunlight which gives a delicious warmth and brightness to the earlier chapters of the novel is soon succeeded by gloom and tempest. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Does Delia's baby want it?" she asked enticingly. The General waved his arms and legs wildly; wreathed in smiles, he opened and shut his mouth in quick alternation, chirping and clucking, as she held it up before him; an ecstatic wriggling pervaded him, and he chuckled unctuously. A moment later only his deep-drawn, nozzling breaths could ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... gone for good—that was quite enough to frighten him," remarked a little clucking voice that reminded Phil of the cry of a fluffy yellow chicken; and the daintiest little Squirrel he had yet seen whisked out from the brushwood and sat beside him. It was the Hackee, or Chipping Squirrel, and many a time Phil had seen him running in and out among the bushes; for the Hackee ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... out his hand for the glass of milk which the solicitous porter held out to him and dutifully drank it, while the porter hovered over him like an anxious hen, clucking out a constant stream ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... me, "I looked down upon a small courtyard surrounded on all sides by houses. In the courtyard sat a clucking hen with eleven chickens; and a pretty little girl was running and jumping around them. The hen was frightened, and screamed, and spread out her wings over the little brood. Then the girl's father came out and scolded her; and I glided away and thought no more ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Cobwebs, woven in the night and bejeweled with dewdrops, festooned the boughs of the trees in the orchard and on the lawn. From the barn-yard back of the farmhouse a chorus of sounds was rising. Pigs were grunting and squealing, cows were mooing, a donkey was braying, ducks were quacking, hens were clucking, ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the clucking hen; "I've something else to do; I'm busy sitting on my eggs, I cannot ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... gone to dispatch the missive by their negro gardener when Mamie and Sallie came clucking in. Mamie's face was pink and high-spirited, but Sallie was in one complete slump of ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... same fine looker!" was all he said, with an appreciative clucking of the throat. Oh, how she hated him, and everything ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... one upon another—and the gleam of a lake among them—and on the furthest verge of the kind familiar scene, the blue and shrouded heads of mountain peaks. She dropped her head on her knees, and could hear the lowing of cattle and the clucking of hens; she saw the meeting-house roof among the trees, and groups scattered through the lanes on the way to the prayer meeting, the older women in their stuff dresses and straw bonnets, the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... only way to do this effectually is to give the upper proprietors of rivers such an interest in the Salmon fisheries as will make them worth attention. At present this is far from being the case. Now the upper proprietors are merely considered as so many clucking hens, whose business and whose duty it is to hatch Salmon for the proprietors of fisheries at the mouths of rivers, who do not in many cases spend a farthing in their protection when spawning, and who grievously begrudge ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... and hot. The southern wind had died away. There was scarcely a sound in all the landscape save the regular clucking of the wagon-wheels, the soft, rhythmical tread of the horses' feet, and the snapping buzz of the grasshoppers rising from the weeds. Far away to the west lay the blue Coteaux, thirty miles distant, long, low, without break, like a wall. The sun was hidden by the cloud, and as he passed a ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... great trees and encircled in meadow and field rich with the promise of harvest; the fragrance of the pink and the hollyhock in the front yard was mingled with the aroma of the orchard and the garden, and the resonant clucking of poultry and the hum of bees. Inside was quiet, cleanliness, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... a little on his elbow, then, to the girls' surprise, a whole farm-yard seemed to have entered the ward. They could hear a sheep bleating, a duck quacking, a dog barking, hens clucking, a cock crowing, and a pig uttering a series of agonized squeals. It was a most comical imitation, and really ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... and bloody bones"—she shook with a nervous giggle—"and all that sort of thing.... Would it please you to know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last quill—that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic Partlet, clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and saw every chick running as fast as its little legs could carry it to the hovering mother wings. Soon every chicken baby was hidden from sight and the chicken mother was clucking ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets
... look at Miss Blake, and she hardly heard the wizard's voice as he asked to be permitted to use the hat for still another experiment, and she scarcely saw how he placed it on a table, a perfectly innocent looking table, and then proceeded to take from it a multitude of things—from a gold watch to a clucking hen. ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... Jenny. With a yell like the war cry of a clucking hen, she waved her umbrella aloft, and went ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... waggon. A cow is there tethered; He churlishly kicks her. His hens begin clucking; He shouts at them, "Silence!" 20 The calf, which is shifting About in the cart. Gets a crack on the forehead. He strikes the roan mare With the whip, and departing He makes for the Volga. The moon is now shining, ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... went her tail, and she growled and spit like a good one. Of course Jock couldn't stand that, so he gave a 'ki-hi!' and after her. They made time round that yard, now I tell you! The hens scuttled off, clucking as if all the foxes in the county had broke loose; and for a minute or two it seemed as if there was two or three dogs and half-a-dozen cats. Well, sir!—I mean, ma'am! at last the cat made a bolt, and up the big maple by the horse-trough. I thought she was safe ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... the joy of my discovery and anticipating the look into the nest. Then, upon my knees in the bow of the skiff, I pulled up by means of the stout dock-leaves until almost able to touch the bird, when she walked off down a dead stalk to the ground, clucking ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... there and enjoyed themselves just like other people. But tonight there seemed to be a sort of spring fever in the air. Outside a cold, persistent rain could be heard falling, in spite of the new leaves on the trees. In the chicken-house the fowls were clucking in a Sunday afternoon ennui. The wretched rain had interfered with the usual Sunday occupations of the men and maids. Footsteps dragged across the yard in whose very sound discontent and boredom could be detected. The raindrops ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... of tongue and pen, His dam was a clucking Khuttuck hen; And the colt bred close to the vice of each, For he carried the ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... The specimen in England is remarkably tame and frolicksome, and does not seem altogether happy except when he is fondled and petted, when he enjoys himself immensely. During the night he delights in active motion, climbing and playing like a kitten, often uttering a loud, clucking noise, which ends with a sharp, shrill call, of astonishing volume. The animal is not so large ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... whitewashed house, under the shade of some gigantic sycamore or overhanging willow. Here would he smoke his pipe of a sultry afternoon, enjoying the soft southern breeze and listening with silent gratulation to the clucking of his hens, the cackling of his geese, and the sonorous grunting of his swine; that combination of farmyard melody, which may truly be said to have a silver sound, inasmuch as it conveys a certain ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... traps, opened the gate, walked past her without a word, and began a professional examination of the garden-beds. When he came to a neglected line of box, he made a sympathetic clucking of the tongue, and before a rosebush, coming out in meagre leafage, he stayed ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... means assume any hereditary connection whatever between the quality of the sound heard and the movement or arrest of movement to be executed, such as may perhaps exist in the case of the chick just hatched which follows the clucking of the hen. Rather does the dog learn afresh in every case the meaning of the words required for hunting, just as the speechless child comprehends the meaning of the first words of its future language without being able to repeat them ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... in the woods, who have slept in the forests under the lovely stars, are awakened by howlings as fantastic as disagreeable. There is everything in this morning concert: clucking, grunting, croaking, sneering, barking, and almost "speaking," if one may make use of this word, which completes the ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... head with wings a-hover; Through rustling heath an adder darted: A hundred rabbits bobbed to cover: A weasel, sleek and rusty-red, Popped out of sight as quick as winking: I saw a grizzled vixen slinking Behind a clucking brood of grouse That rose and cackled at my coming: And all about my way were flying The peewit, with their slow wings creaking; And little jack-snipe darted, drumming: And now and then a golden plover ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... her feathers on end, her face swollen, her crest red, clucking away, trying to persuade her babies not to venture into the water. For hens, like cats, hate the water. It was unspeakable torture to her. The children would not listen; deaf to her prayers, her cries, these rascally babies ventured farther and farther out. ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... to the floor, leaned his head against Joe's and made a noise like a clucking hen. Joe nodded and whistled loudly through his nostrils, putting to shame the knowledge of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... window came the noises of the village as it set about living another day, precisely as it had lived innumerable days in the past. The blast of the six-o'clock whistle from the planing-mill made the loose sashes of his windows rattle. Came a lowing of cows and a clucking of hens, a woman's calling. The voices of men in conversation came so distinctly through the pall that it seemed a number of persons must be moving about their morning work, talking and shouting, right ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Caliphs and Viziers always listened to what the birds said about it, before they undertook any new enterprise. I have often thought I heard wise old folk discoursing, when a company of hens were busy on the side-hill, scratching and clucking together. Perchance some day we shall pick up a leaf of that herb which shall open our ears ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... them we may see with what tender affection God of his great goodness longeth to gather us under the protection of his wings, and how often like a loving hen he clucketh home unto him even those chickens of his that wilfully walk abroad into the kite's danger and will not come at his clucking, but ever, the more he clucketh for them, the farther they go from him. And therefore can we not doubt that, if we will follow him and with faithful hope come running to him, he shall in all matter of temptation take us near unto ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... crone clucking and crowing, like a hen over its egg, of the happiness that had come to her old years; till recognising the youth's state she covered him over with a cloak amid exclamations ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... up in alarm as his crusty tempered employer appeared, followed by the stout figure of Pillbot. He rose and stood aside unassumingly, as Pillbot bent over the scrawls on his charts, clucking interestedly. ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... to lead you thither from the storm And lurking dangers, yet you turn away. And, thinking to be your own protector, stray Into the open jaws of death: for, see! An owl is sitting in this very tree You thought safe shelter. Go now to your pen." And, followed by the clucking, clamorous hen, So like the human mother here again, Moaning because a strong, protecting arm Would shield her little ones from cold and harm, I carried back my garden hat brimful Of chirping chickens, like white balls of wool, And snugly housed them. And just ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that day Miki rushed to the defense of their meat. The big-eyed, clucking moose-birds were most annoying. Next to them the Canada jays were most persistent. Twice a little gray-coated ermine, with eyes as red as garnets, came in to get his fill of blood. Miki was at him so fiercely that he did not return a third time. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... and lameness. In the meantime the little ones scattered in every direction and were not to be found. As soon as the parent was satisfied of their safety, she flew a short distance and he soon heard her clucking call to them to come to her again. It was surprising how quickly they reached her side, seeming to pop up as ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... sideways, opening as it fell, and a cock, his head enclosed in a little chamois bag such as are used for gold watches, struggled blindly out into the open air. A second, similarly hooded, followed. The pair, stupefied in their headgear, stood rigid and bewildered in their tracks, clucking uneasily. Their tails were closely sheared. Their legs, thickly muscled, and extraordinarily long, were furnished with enormous cruel-looking spurs. The breed was unmistakable. Annixter looked once at the pair, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Rafael, Sausalito, Mill Valley, San Mateo, Redwood City and Palo Alto were next telephoned to, and when this long and expensive task was done, Ex-Private Bill Peck emerged from the telephone booth wringing wet with perspiration and as irritable as a clucking hen. Once outside the hotel he raised his haggard face to heaven and dumbly queried of the Almighty what He meant by saving him from quick death on the field of honor only to condemn him to be talked to death by B. ...
— The Go-Getter • Peter B. Kyne
... prone on my back, staring up at the cobwebby, smoke-blackened rafters, while the shadows shortened and lengthened in the bright sunlit yard, the monotonous silence broken only by the deep regular snores of my companion, whose capacity for sleep was something marvellous, the clucking of poultry, and the occasional stamp or snort of a horse in the stable below. Now and again a rat would crawl out, and, emboldened by the stillness, creep close up to me, darting back into its hole with a jump and a squeal as I waved it off with hand or foot. My visitors from the village did not ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... course of her life, generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... for weeks. Nor was Babbitt one of the detachable husbands who take separations casually He liked to have her there; she looked after his clothes; she knew how his steak ought to be cooked; and her clucking made him feel secure. But he could not drum up even a dutiful "Oh, she doesn't really need you, does she?" While he tried to look regretful, while he felt that his wife was watching him, he was filled with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... shebeen or of the tinker's fire in a roadside ditch; they have, too, the bog smell, and the smell of the whin, the smell of ploughed land and of the sea, and they fall into cadences that are cadences of the wind and of the tides, of full rivers and clucking streams that sudden rains have filled, as well as the cadences of the voices of boy and girl and they love-making, and of the voices of the wild folk of the roads coaxing or loudly quarreling, and the voices of women and men, young and old, lamenting the hard way ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... me also with not a little subtilty (and double-dealing too, I fancied,) regarding my own country, and of things present, and things real. In fact nothing, I think, so much flattered his vanity—unless it was my wonder at Dame Partlett's clucking on his viol-strings—as to learn himself was famous even so far as to ages yet unborn. He gazed on the simple moon with limpid, amiable eyes, and caught ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... too confident of his fealty. I know men better than you know them, my dear. Man loves beauty, but he does not always want to marry it. The rare white swan is admired, but the little brown partridge, clucking as she marshals her covey of chicks, is the type of the marrying woman. Again, no man is master of himself. That Strathay wishes to marry you, I can understand; but, perhaps, when he is not under the spell of your presence, he falls to wondering how you will ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... such dimensions. There was no getting forth, no living creature of free will "took water" in this elemental crisis. The numerous dogs crowded the children away from the hearth, and the hens strolled about the large living-room, clucking to scurrying broods. Even one of the horses tramped up on the porch and looked in ever and anon, solicitous ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... on his way until abreast of me, and then, without warning and with incredible swiftness, he smote me a buffet on the head. I was knocked backward fully a dozen feet before I fetched up against the ground, and I remember, half-stunned, even as the blow was struck, hearing the wild uproar of clucking and shrieking laughter that arose from the caves. It was a great joke—at least in that day; and right heartily the Folk ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... a thorough scrutiny, began the strangest talking Sarka had ever heard. The crater-Gnomes seemed to communicate by making strange clucking sounds with their tongues, sounds which were unmusical and discordant, and which, as the Gnomes who stood back from them, because already the two were covered until no more could cling to Jaska or Sarka, joined in the speech—mounted in the cavern to a vast ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... rolls of yellow and black down; but now that they were great stalking, ragged fowls, putting on all sorts of airs, they excited his ridicule, and he longed to tease them, and the last year's brood of clucking hens and crowing roosters, that didn't quite know what to make of ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... thread was a length of cobweb. Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks just out of the egg. The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple-boughs, and there was one little home of straw so hung that Lyddy could look into it and see the patient mother brooding her nestlings. The sight of ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin |
