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More "Blackbird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... How do the Blackbird and Thrassel with their melodious voices bid welcome to the cheerful Spring, and in their fixed months warble forth such ditties as no art or instrument can ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... his breakfast, never served to time, Mr. Lashmar drummed upon the window-pane, and seemed to watch a blackbird lunching with much gusto about the moist lawn of Alverholme Vicarage. But his gaze was absent and worried. The countenance of the reverend gentleman rarely wore any other expression, for he took to heart all human miseries and follies, and lived ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... different song-birds in the garden, and one robin. I loved the robin best of all. His song was not so beautiful as the blackbird's or so mellow as the thrush's; but they hid and ran away from me, whilst the robin sought me out and stayed with me and sang me, all to myself, a little, tiny, gentle song of which I never grew tired. If I stayed quite still, he came so close he almost touched me; but if I moved towards ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... Samson, "de rale sugar-corn, de blackbird gits. None of dem white gulls and pigeons gits dat corn. A white feller ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... What doth the blackbird in the boughs Sing all day to his nested spouse? What but the song of his old Mother-Earth, In her mighty humour of lust and mirth? 'Love and God's will go wing and wing, And as for death, is there any such thing?'— ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... waiting in that rainbow-glory fifty years ago for it to go on and say what it may of what followed. She comes out on the terrace through the high middle-window that opens on it, and now she stands in the blinding gleam, shading her eyes with her hand. It is late in July, and one may listen for a blackbird's note in vain. That song in the ash that drips a diamond-shower on the soaked lawn, whenever the wind breathes, may still be a thrush; his last song, perhaps, about his second family, before he retires for the season. The year we thought ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... wild bird. And yet imprisonment has brought out the excellencies of many men. I have learned many things in the lonely hours there. I have learned that hope is a divinity; I have learned that a surplus of determination conquers every weakness; I have learned that you cannot mate a white dove to a blackbird; I have learned that vengeance is for God and not for man; I have learned that there are some things better than a picture on a church window; I have learned that the American people, and especially the good people of Minnesota, do not strip a fallen foe; I have learned ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... that the whole bird world is ruled by the signs that the trees hang out.' And she asked me what they were, and I told her to notice next spring that as soon as the birch-leaves opened, the pheasant began to crow and the thrush to sing and the blackbird to whistle; and when the oak-leaves looked their reddest, and not a day before, the whole tribe of finches ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... man I want to know it; if I ain't, it's time my friends knowed it. Anyhow, I'm man enough to work out with some of that gang. Most of them have put it over me one time or another; Sinclair pasted me like a blackbird only the other day. They all say I'm nothing but a damned tramp. You say I have done ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... less than a blackbird: the bill is black; the lower mandible yellowish at the base: head, back, wings, and tail, blue tinged with green: the under parts of the body white, extending round the middle of the neck like a collar: ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... I'd like to have some of his white fur for my nest," remarked Rusty the Blackbird. "I think I'll ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... wanted to talk and he could be over-urged to talk if the right pressure was brought to bear. Janice came away, leaving the eagerly curious pecking at him—the one white blackbird in the flock. ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... birds with part of their sustenance, and the principal of these are two well known songsters, the blackbird and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... w'en you go along wit' me, For I show you all aroun' dere, until you 're knowin' how I come so moche to brag—me—on de Riviere des Prairies. It 's a cole October mornin', an' de maple leaf is change Ev'ry color you can t'ink of, from de purple to de green; On de shore de crowd of blackbird, an' de crow begin' arrange For de journey dey be takin' w'en ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... our approach from under the tall tree Of his delight, shaking his forelocks long In wanton play; while, overhead, his hymn, As 'twere to herald the approach of night, With all her gathering stars, the blackbird sang Melodiously, mellifluously, and Earth Look'd up, reflecting back the smiles of Heaven! For Innocence, o'er hill and dale again Seem'd to have spread her mantle, and the voice Of all but joy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... should now awake, T'awayt the comming of your ioyous make,% And hearken to the birds love-learned song, The deawy leaves among! For they of ioy and pleasance to you sing, 90 That all the woods them answer, and theyr eccho ring. [* Mavis, song-thrush.] [** Descant, variation.] [@ Ouzell, blackbird.] [$ Ruddock, redbreast.] [% ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... the shade, resting my burning feet and achiag bones, and I watched Nielsen as he whistled over the camp chores. Then I heard the sweet song of a meadow lark, and after that the melodious deep note of a swamp blackbird. These birds evidently were traveling north and had ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... call some hundreds of yards ahead of them was heard, and after a time it was repeated. Then the blackbird's notes rang out from behind, and then another note came from the front. Ere the voice behind could again reply a solemn "Hoot-a-hoot-a-hoo" came from ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... the squirrel up there in the oak and the rabbit under the hedge. I listen as of old to the chirp of the grasshopper in the stubble, to the hum of the bees among the foxgloves, to the song of the blackbird on the hawthorn, and, best of all—yes, best of all for brain unsteadied and nerve unstrung—I see the cows ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... and is near the last resting-place of Hetty Hutter and her mother. And far to the southwest lies a long, low, curving beach jutting sickle-shape into the lake. As a favored haunt of muskrats, it was once called Muskrat Cove, and now Blackbird Bay. Just beyond lies Fenimore, the home of Cooper's ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... sort of recklessness with her father, a complete, chosen carelessness that had the laugh of ridicule in it. He loved to make her voice go high and shouting and defiant with laughter. The baby was dark-skinned and dark-haired, like the mother, and had hazel eyes. Brangwen called him the blackbird. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... they do not leave us at the first cold blast, to find a warmer climate; the least we can do is to recompense them by feeding them when the weather is too severe! Several know me already, and are very tame. There is a blackbird in particular, and a blue tomtit, that are both ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... rose one day, having a mind to see it. 'Twas on a clear Spring morning, and a blackbird Awoke me with his warbling near my window: My dream had fashioned this into a song That some one with grey eyes was singing me, And which had drawn me so into myself That all the other shapes of sleep were gone: ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... on, ye feathered songsters, Lift your praises loud and high, Merry lark, and thrush, and blackbird, In the grove and in the sky Make your music, shame our dumbness, Till we ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... child, at which the broken parts came together and were made whole; that once on receiving his food in a basket, let down to his otherwise inaccessible cell, the devil vainly tried to vex him by breaking the rope; that once Satan, assuming the form of a blackbird, nearly blinded him by the flapping of his wings; that once, too, the same tempter appeared as a beautiful Roman girl, to whose fascinations, in his youth, St. Benedict had been sensible, and from which he now hardly escaped by rolling himself ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... of woodpeckers; on the habits of the snipe; on the whitethroat; on the moulting of the snipes; on the moulting of the Anatidae; on the finding of new mates by magpies; on the pairing of a blackbird and thrush; on pied ravens; on the guillemots; on the colours of the tits; on ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... me give one. I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were in Samoa—we really were on the beach and hard aground—when my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled stroke-oar in my boat. ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... creation of women. If they envy her they will hate her also; and I doubt if she will have many more friends among the fisher-lads. They will look upon her as a renegade to her order. The old women will suspect her, and the old men look askance at her with disapproving eyes. The girl will be a white blackbird; the properly colored birds will drive her out of the colony or pick her to death. It ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... the boy beneath them.[8] The life of earth is rarely thought of as distinct from the life of man. It is so in a few late epigrams. The complaint of the cicala, torn away by shepherds from its harmless green life of song and dew among the leaves, and the poem bidding the blackbird leave the dangerous oak, where, with its breast against a spray, it pours out its clear music,[9] are probably of Roman date; another of uncertain period but of great beauty, an epitaph on an old ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... I do?" asked the cook, in perplexity; "the King has ordered a blackbird pie, and your birds are the ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... himself, with his sensitive nature—who can fathom the profound depths of his soul now stirred by two such entrancing sights as the high-smoking blackbird-pie won by his own prowess, and the little monarch for whose sake all this was brought about? The delicious smell excites him like draughts of rich old wine, and all the soul within him bubbles up exultingly, and he improvises on the moment. Joyfully he sings in melodious ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... house, "go on. I will hear you out." And then, seeing him stand before her with so much obvious disrelish to the task, she was suddenly overcome with laughter. Julia's laugh was a thing to ravish lovers; she rolled her mirthful descant with the freedom and the melody of a blackbird's song upon the river, and repeated by the echoes of the farther bank. It seemed a thing in its own place and a sound native to the open air. There was only one creature who heard it without joy, and that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... personality; and it is certain that he has told a very entertaining story. There are in this volume battle, murder, sudden death, outlaws, cowboys, bears, American politics, and the author's views on the English blackbird, all handsomely illustrated, and the price is only what you would (or would not) pay for a stall to see a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... herself. Kitty, further, had a ridiculous way of eating, which Miss Abingdon could not approve. She ate mere morsels of everything and talked the whole time, very often with the air of a gourmet; and she would lay down her knife and fork, after a meal such as a healthy blackbird might have enjoyed, as though she had finished some aldermanic feast. She accepted a glass of Miss Abingdon's very special claret and never even touched it; and later, in one of the pauses of her elaborate trifling ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... the sky, Turtle-doves and linnets, fly! Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay, Hither, hither, haste away! One and all come help me, quick! Haste ye, haste ye!—pick, ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... examination, that it is perfectly innocuous. A neighbouring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for some good hints) killed and opened a female viper about the 27th May: he found her filled with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of those of a blackbird; but none of them were advanced so far towards a state of maturity as to contain any rudiments of young. Though they are oviparous, yet they are viviparous also, hatching their young within their bellies, and then bringing them forth. Whereas snakes lay chains of eggs every summer ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... nothing—nothing, save the common noises of the wood, the angry chatter of a disturbed blackbird as it flew low into hiding, or the harsh notes of a flock of starlings as they rose from the meadow. The hum of bees filled the air, and the August flies buzzed about his sweating brow, for he had lost his cap. But behind him—nothing. Already the stillness ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... his counting-house Counting out his money, The Queen was in the parlour Eating bread and honey, The maid was in the garden Hanging out the clothes, When by came a blackbird And ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... is both tender and graceful. Probably her best song is the setting of W.E. Henley's fine poem, "Dark is the Night." It is of the "Erl-King" style, but highly original and tremendously fierce and eerie. The same poet's "Western Wind" is given a setting contrastingly dainty and serene. "The Blackbird" is delicious and quite unhackneyed. "A Secret" is bizarre, and "Empress of the Night" is brilliant. With the exception of a certain excess of dissonance for a love-song, "Wilt Thou Be My Dearie?" is perfect with amorous tenderness. "Just for This!" is a delightful ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... of stirring shadow. Here close beside a red and black candle a man is driving nails into a shoe. Two children stretch their hands toward the hearth. A blackbird sleeps in its wicker cage. Water is boiling in the smoky earthenware pot from which rises a disagreeable soupy smell which mingles with that of tanner's bark and leather. A crouching dog gazes ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... the dreamy murmur of waters lost in deepest woods, and all the fairy echoes whispering when the leaves are motionless in the noonday heat; then followed notes, cool and soft as the drip of summer showers on the parched grass, and then the song of the blackbird sounding as clearly as it sounds in long silent spaces of the evening, and then in one sweet jocund burst the multitudinous voices that hail the breaking of the morn. And the lark, singing and soaring above the ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... moulded into more than mortal beauty. A bright ray of the setting sun streamed full upon that face, now reposing in the awful but hallowed calm which is sometimes diffused around the bed of death. The sacred stillness was only broken by the evening song of the blackbird and the distant lowing of the cattle—sounds which had often brought pleasure to that heart, now insensible to all human emotion. All nature shone forth in gaiety and splendour, but the eye and the ear were alike closed against all earthly objects. Yet ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... figure was not inferior in height to the old one's, but his shoulders were narrower, his features less broad and full, and his hair and beard had the glossy raven hue of the blackbird's plumage. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... scorn the mounting wings, The happy heights of souls serene, I wander where the blackbird sings, And over bubbling, shadowy springs, The beech-leaves cluster, young ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... wild, Shall to the skies aspire; The gowdspink, music's gayest child, Shall sweetly join the choir: The blackbird strong, the lintwhite clear, The mavis mild and mellow; The robin pensive autumn cheer, In ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and if you hear three little twits like a blackbird's, only louder, you can answer, for it ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... and the Queen were riding Upon a Summer's day, And a Blackbird flew above them, To hear what ...
— Marigold Garden • Kate Greenaway
... of our British birds, the sole speaker occasionally drops into English, or I should never have understood what was going on. He may be a blackbird or thrush, but I doubt it, because I know all their remarks, while his are new to me. If A.A.M. heard them he would probably tell me they were those of a "Blackman's Warbler," and I should have believed him—once. Hardly now, after he has so airily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... this is also booted to the toes. the flesh of this is preferable to either of the others and that of the breast is as white as the pheasant of the Atlantic coast.the redish brown pheasant has been previously discribed.- The Crow raven and Large Blackbird are the same as those of our country only that the crow is here much smaller yet it's note is the same. I observe no difference either between the hawks of this coast and those of the Atlantic. I have observed the large brown hawk, ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... twinkled the delicate bloom of blue-eyed grass. Never in all this world was our Big Creek lovelier. It went slipping, and whispering, and lipping, and lapping over the stones, tugging at the rushes and grasses as it washed their feet; everything beside it was in masses of bloom, a blackbird was gleaming and preening on every stone, as it plumed after its bath. Oh there's no use to try—it was just SPRING when it ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... more familiar name of Crow Blackbird this fine but unpopular bird is known, unpopular among the farmers for his depredations in their cornfields, though the good he does in ridding the soil, even at the harvest season, of noxious insects and grubs should be set ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... his trussed and helpless plight, Jack Ryder grinned. He moved his head slightly. "That blackbird of ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... low wind may lift her hair, Motionless in lip and limb; E'en the fearful mouse may skim O'er the window-sill, nor stir From the crumb at sight of her; Through the lattice unheard float Summer blackbird's evening note;— E'en the sullen foe would bless That ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... the pantry, eating bread and honey The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes; There came a little blackbird and peck'd ...
— Harry's Ladder to Learning - Horn-Book, Picture-Book, Nursery Songs, Nursery Tales, - Harry's Simple Stories, Country Walks • Anonymous
... too. And 'tis effect we have upon another. The birds had taken home their worm-cheer to the little ones in the nests, and were singing their after-supper songs, very sweetly but drowsily. 'Twas too late in the year for the Nightingale,—that I knew,—but the jolly Blackbird was in full feather and voice; and presently there swept by me a great Owl, going home to feast, I will be bound, in his hollow tree, and with nothing less than a Field Mouse for his supper, the rascal. 'Twas a wicked imagining, but ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... already written his "Tancredi" and the opera buffa, "The Italians in Algiers." His best work (besides "William Tell") was "The Barber of Seville." Other works are "Cinderella" (La Cenerentola), "The Thieving Blackbird" (La Gazza Ladra), "Moses," and "The Lady of the Lake." These operas were mostly made up of parts of others that were failures, a la Hasse. An engagement being offered him in London, he went there with his wife, and in one season ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... hardships, and adventures of Marina, Celadyne, Redmond, Fida, Philocel, Aletheia, Metanoia, and Amintas do not hold the reader from delight in descriptions of the blackbird and dove calling from the dewy branches; crystal streams lisping through banks purple with violets, rosy with eglantine, or sweet with wild thyme; thickets where the rabbits hide; sequestered nooks ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... perfectness. Not their modes of corruption, disease, or death. Not even, always, their genesis, in the more or less blundering beginnings of it; not even their modes of nourishment, if destructive; you must not stuff a blackbird pulling up a worm, nor exhibit in a glass case ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... attitude and gait would at times resemble the movements of a cock pheasant: now stealing along for a few yards, listening for the slightest sound of any animal stirring in the underwood; now standing on tiptoe for a time, with bated breath. Did a blackbird—that dusky sentinel of the woods—utter her characteristic note of warning, he would whisper, "Hark!" Then, after due deliberation, he would add, "'Tis a fox!" or, "There's a fox in the grove," and then he would steal gently up ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... attack, were to mount with the children to the rooms above, while my husband and his men were to make good their defence as long as possible against the enemy. Since I had shown my sportsmanship by bringing down accidentally a blackbird on the wing, I felt as if I could do some execution with my little pistols, which were regularly placed beside my pillow at night; and I was fully resolved to use them, if necessity required. I do not remember to have felt the slightest ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... or prairie ... with flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wild pigeon and high-hold and orchard-oriole and coot and surf-duck and red-shouldered-hawk and fish-hawk and white ibis and Indian-hen and cat-owl and water-pheasant and qua-bird and pied-sheldrake and blackbird and mockingbird and buzzard and condor and night-heron and eagle. To him the hereditary countenance descends both mother's and father's. To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... of a bird awoke her. She recognized at once the sweet, shrill notes of a blackbird. Day was breaking. She began to shake, for she was chilled to the bone. The dampness of the night had made her clothes as wet as though she had been ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... the woodland That hangs upon the hill; Hark! the cock is tuning His morning clarion shrill; And hurriedly awaking From his nest amid the spray, Cheerily now, the blackbird, Whistling, greets the day. For be it ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Peacock butterfly spread its brown velvet and gorgeously eyed wings to the sun's warmth; a blackbird with brilliant yellow bill stood astride a peach twig and poured out a bubbling and incessant melody full of fluted grace notes. And on the grass oval a kitten frisked with the ghosts of last month's dandelions, racing ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... who claimed the crow would eat animal food in any form, and might not be rightly classified as a grain-eating bird, Prof. Stearns said the crow was thus classified by reason of the structure of its crop being similar to that of the finches, the blackbird, the sparrows, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... reigns among the common people, is this: you may pass through the whole South of France, as well as the county of Nice, where there is no want of groves, woods, and plantations, without hearing the song of blackbird, thrush, linnet, gold-finch, or any other bird whatsoever. All is silent and solitary. The poor birds are destroyed, or driven for refuge, into other countries, by the savage persecution of the people, who spare no pains to kill, and catch them for their own subsistence. Scarce ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... George Sand was ill, and this exasperated Musset. He was annoyed, and declared that a woman out of sorts was very trying. There are good reasons for believing that he had found her very trying for some time. He was very elegant and she a learned "white blackbird." He was capricious and she a placid, steady bourgeois woman, very hard-working and very regular in the midst of her irregularity. He used to call her "personified boredom, the dreamer, the silly ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... Blackbird was by this time prevailed on to sing, and burst out as melodious as ever, while all heads were cocked on one side ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... palace, and the grotesque animals carven on the balustrade; the green flicker of lizards on the drowsy garden-wall; the old-world sun-dial and the grotto and the marble fountain, and the cool green gloom of the cypress-grove with its delicious dapple of shadows. An invisible blackbird fluted overhead. He walked along the great walk under the stone eyes of sculptured gods, and looked out upon the hot landscape taking its siesta under the ardent blue sky—the green sunlit hills, the white nestling villas, the gray olive-trees. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... gaze a ruby, or what appeared to be a ruby, of such size and so lovely a colour, that his eyes were dazzled when he looked at it. The gem, though roughly polished, was uncut, but its dimensions were those of a small blackbird's egg, it was of the purest pigeon-blood colour, without a flaw, and worn almost round, apparently by the action of water. Now, as it chanced, Leonard knew something of gems, although unhappily he was less acquainted with the peculiarities of the ruby ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... hear the lark's ecstatic gush From his clear ambush in the sky; A blackbird (if it's not a thrush) Sings from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... a bright morning in May. The white swans were sailing tranquilly to and fro over the silver basin, and the mavis, blackbird, and nightingale, which haunted the groves surrounding the castle and the town, were singing as if the daybreak were ushering in a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... forests,'" she cried, "'you must find your fun'—are those the words of the song, Margot?—Oh, look, look!" she pointed joyously to a blackbird on top the swaying maple outside her window. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees. But they have a crony never seen by us. This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from his over-allowance of rudder that pulls him side-wise and ruins his dead-reckoning when a wind is on. His wife is a sober-looking lady in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... sometimes a greenfinch, or chaffinch, now and then a robin, in one place a shrike, perhaps another is a redstart. They are fly-fishing all of them, seizing insects from the sorrel tips and grass, as the kingfisher takes a roach from the water. A blackbird slips up into the oak and a dove descends in the corner by the chestnut tree. But these are not visible together, only one at a time and with intervals. The larger part of the life of the hedge is out of sight. All the thrush-fledglings, the young blackbirds, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Spouter. "I heard my father say he wouldn't take four hundred dollars for Blackbird. And the other animals must be worth at least a hundred and fifty dollars apiece. You know they always had pretty good ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... employer's things as of her own. The full amount of her mischiefs often does not appear at once, as she is glib of tongue, adroit in apologies, and lies with as much alertness and as little thought of conscience as a blackbird chatters. It is difficult for people who have been trained from childhood in the school of verities,—who have been lectured for even the shadow of a prevarication, and shut up in disgrace for a lie, till truth becomes a habit of their souls,—it is very difficult ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... white with blossom; and you saw the horns, Through last year's fern, of the shy fallow-deer Who come at noon down to the water here. You saw the bright-eyed squirrels dart along Under the thorns on the green sward; and strong The blackbird whistled from the dingles near, And the weird chipping of the woodpecker Rang lonelily and sharp; the sky was fair, And a fresh breath of spring stirr'd everywhere. Merlin and Vivian stopp'd on the slope's brow, To gaze on the light sea of leaf and ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... frame with the mighty pulse of her engines, Slowly the boat ascended the swollen and broad Mississippi, Bank-full, sweeping on, with nearing masses of drift-wood, Daintily breathed about with hazes of silvery vapor, Where in his arrowy flight the twittering swallow alighted, And the belated blackbird paused on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... has put dust in my milk. Do you suppose I am going to drink coffee with ashes in it? Well, I am not surprised; no one can do two things at once. She wasn't thinking of the milk! a blackbird might have flown through the kitchen to-day and she wouldn't have seen it! how should she see the dust flying! and then it was my ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... inhabitant of the Namakagun. The Chippewas, at a hunting camp we passed yesterday, said they had been on the tracks of a moose, but lost them in high brush. Ducks and pigeons appear common. Among smaller birds are the blackbird, robin, catbird, red-headed woodpecker, kingfisher, kingbird, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... well that the boys should learn how to shoot. He insisted, however, that only one gun should be taken out at a time, to diminish the danger of accidents. After that the boys took out their guns by turns when they went to work of a morning, and many a dead blackbird soon ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... sounding nearer now, and at any moment the game might appear. Sir Nicholas shifted his position again a little, and simultaneously the scolding voice of a blackbird rang out in front, and he stopped again. At the same moment a hare, mad with fright, burst out of the cover, making straight for the shelter. Sir Nicholas' hands rose, steady now the crisis had come; ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... go before a faint light stole down to guide his way, and he reached the spot where the passage was roofed in with dead branches and twigs, and as he reached it, just faintly heard, came the shrill cry of a blackbird—Pink-pink-pink!—from somewhere ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... yet another outbreak of cheering, dispersed. Followed a silence in the darkness under the platform, broken only by the distant thudding bass of the roundabout's steam organ; and then between the boards there sounded a liquid chuckle, much like a blackbird's, and ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tendency in language is to put two words of this kind which express but one idea under a single accent, and when this has taken place, no one but the student of language any longer observes what the elements really mean. When the ordinary man talks of a "blackbird" it is certainly not present to his consciousness that he is talking of a black bird, unless for some reason conversation has been dwelling upon the colour rather than other characteristics ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... by my brother's sympathy, he fumbled in his pocket, and found a sheet of note-paper. Upon this he had written a quatrain that he proposed to read to us au clair de la lune. The lines were addressed: "To My Own Blackbird." ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... but she settled down very quiet-like with Aunty Biddy here, knowing yourselves to be going to Lawrence, and I told her stay as long as she had a mind. Wisha, she 'd an old apron on her in five minutes' time, an' took hold wit' the wash, and wint singing like a blackbird out in the yard at the line. 'Sit down, Aunty!' says she; 'you 're not so light-stepping as me, an' I 'll tell you all the news from home; an' I 'll get the dinner, too, when I 've done this,' says she. Wisha, but she's the good cook for such a young thing; 't ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... cars, toy pianos; but not one of their playthings was alive, like Piccola's birdling. They were as pleased as she, and Rose hunted about the house until she found a large wicker cage that belonged to a blackbird she once had. She gave the cage to Piccola, and the swallow seemed to make himself quite at home in it at once, and sat on the perch winking his bright eyes at the children. Rose had saved a bag of candies for Piccola, and when she went ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... their speedy dispersion. So beautiful, so tranquil, looked the old monastic fane, that none would have deemed its midnight rest had been broken by the impious rites of a foul troop. The choir, where the unearthly scream and the demon laughter had resounded, was now vocal with the melodies of the blackbird, the thrush, and other songsters of the grove. Bells of dew glittered upon the bushes rooted in the walls, and upon the ivy-grown pillars; and gemming the countless spiders' webs stretched from bough to bough, showed they were all unbroken. No traces were visible on the sod where the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Were blackbird's nests and thrush's, Soon to be hidden In leaves on green leaves thickening, Boughs over ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... sight; the shadows lengthen in the valleys, the sun withdraws, one by one, his rays from the darkening foliage, the silence deepens every minute. You look behind you; the groups and clumps of trees assume colossal proportions; a blackbird at the summit of a tree bids farewell to the parting day, then silence covers all like a funeral pall. You can only hear now the last year's dead leaves crisping under foot, and far, far, away a waterfall filling the valley with its monotonous ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... September morning I well remember! Dame Nature was just donning her variegated gown of rustic-brown, while fitful airs from the realms of Jack Frost were painting the wild roses and forest leaves in cardinal hue, and the blackbird, thrush and musical nightingale flew low and sang hoarse, but continually, in their assemblages for migration to lands of sun ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... went downward through the bushes, which ever and again brushed against their sleeves, and twice over startled and arrested by a sudden dash as of an enemy; but it was nothing worse than a startled bird, blackbird or thrush, roused from its roosting sleep by the ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... similar bones in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, and fin of a porpoise, are related to similar conditions of life. No one supposes that the stripes on the whelp of a lion, or the spots on the young blackbird, are of any use to ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... Waving aloft their tow'ring branches proud, In borrow'd tinges from the eastern cloud, (Whence inspiration, pure as ever flow'd, And genuine transport in his bosom glow'd) His own shrill matin join'd the various notes Of Nature's music, from a thousand throats: The blackbird strove with emulation sweet, And Echo answer'd from her close retreat; The sporting white-throat on some twig's end borne, Pour'd hymns to freedom and the rising morn; Stopt in her song perchance the starting ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... down a furze-lighted hill, And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still; But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call, The foolishness is on me, and ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... him first, jay and blackbird and thrush; They shriek at his coming and curse him, each one; With the clay of the vale on his pads and his brush, It's the Fallowfield fox and he's pretty near done; It's a couple of hours since a whip tally-ho'd him; Now the rookery's stooping to mob and to goad him; There's an earth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... to the spring-time chorus of the birds, lazily and listlessly watching a bough that bent and waved its fan of foliage across my face, or the twinkle of the tireless kingfisher flashing down-stream in loops of light, when a blackbird lit on a branch hard by my left hand, and, all unconscious of an audience, began to pour forth his rapture to ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... violet He listened to the chant of the birds, so joyous that it seemed impossible they sang in a world of sorrow. Hidden among the leaves, aloft in the beeches, the linnet sang with full-throated melody, and the blackbird and the thrush. In the distance a cuckoo called its mysterious note, and far away, like an echo, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... replied. "Not yet! Maybe he isn't coming here this summer." Mr. Blackbird liked to tease little Mr. Chippy. And generally when he tried to, ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... verdant and lively of all the family of trees. Here a broad, rude stone steppeth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into grass and weeds; anon a fresh pathway divergeth, you know not whither. Meanwhile the wild blackbird startles across the way and singeth anew in some other shade. To have seen Fiammetta there, stepping in silk attire, like a flower, and the sunlight looking upon her betwixt the branches! I had not walked (in the body) with Romance before. Then suppose so much of a space cleared as maketh a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the soft voice, for gray mist was descending, Slow rose the bard and retired from the hill, The blackbird's mild notes with the thrush's were blending, Oft scream'd the plover her wild notes and shrill, Yet still from the hoary bard, Methought the sweet song I heard, Mix'd with instruction and blended with woe; And oft as I pass along, Chimes in mine ear his song, "Life's like the dew ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... from a young pig in a dish placed before Mr. Dinsmore, and the song of the blackbird from a pie Grandma Elsie ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... out with my team and my dray too, Wid a whip like a flail and such gaiters, Ohone! But the bullocks, as they eyed me, they seemed for to say too, “You may do your best, Paddy, we’re blest if we go.” “Gee whoa! Redman! come hither, Damper! Hoot, Magpie! Gee, Blackbird! Come hither, Whalebone!” ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... when the twilight's falling softly In the little green orchard; When the grey dew distills And every flower-cup fills; When the last blackbird says, 'What - what!' and goes her way - ssh! I have heard voices calling softly In the little ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... of the perching birds, includes all our common song-birds, such as the robin, bluebird, and blackbird, as well as a few ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... crime—that!—of your Parliamentary Italy! What harm had the poor things done that they should be turned out? You heard what that carabiniere said?—that they farmed half the plateau. And now look at that! I feel as I do when I see a blackbird's nest on the ground, that some beastly boy has been robbing and destroying. I want to get at ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and there, silvering the bushes, the elder offered its snowy tribute to the summer. All the insect youth were abroad, with their bright wings and glancing motion; and from the lower depths of the bushes the blackbird darted across, or higher and unseen the first cuckoo of the eve began its continuous and mellow note. All this cheeriness and gloss of life, which enamour us with the few bright days of the English summer, make the poetry in an angler's life, and convert every idler at heart into a moralist, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wren of softest note Builds its nest and warbles well; Here the blackbird strains his throat; Welcome, welcome ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... The ragworts and the wild geraniums made a yellow and purple fretwork all around him, and the colour gave him a sense of keen gladness. He faced round and entered the quivering gloom of the woods again, but his step on the gravel was sharp and firm. Every faculty of him seemed to have waked. A blackbird bugled cheerily in the underwood, and Ellington felt a strange thrill. He reached the Hall, and sat down to wait for the dressing-bell, but the hour before dinner, usually so heavy to him, went by briskly. During dinner he made no attempt at sustained ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... they eat?—To determine whether seeds would lose their vitality in passing through the digestive organs of birds, Kerner von Marilaun fed seeds of two hundred and fifty different species of plants to each of the following: blackbird, song thrush, robin, jackdaw, raven, nutcracker, goldfinch, titmouse, bullfinch, crossbill, pigeon, fowl, turkey, duck, and a few others; also to marmot, horse, ox, and pig, making five hundred and twenty separate experiments. As to the marmot, horse, ox, and pig, almost all the fruits and seeds ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... Grief with tender Joy is at strife, And Joy is wounded and nigh to death. Their quarrel is old,—as old as life,— "And Grief is right," the sad world saith. But, hark! from yonder wood The blackbird singeth gay, "Joy is in the right of it, And Grief is in the wrong of it, Whatever the world ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... two giants, who made a bet as to which of them could throw a stone farthest. The stakes were four deer. One giant, called Goli, carried a bird in his hand and threw it instead of the stone; so he won; then he returned to where the Blackbird and the Crow were standing. The Blackbird said to the Crow, "They will not do us any harm until they stoop to pick up a stone." But the Crow replied, "Maybe they bring the stone in their hands." So they flew away, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... straddling wide forward-step, and his springy side-wise series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American blackbird. But the sharp resemblances stop there. He is much bigger than the blackbird; and he lacks the blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and shapely beak; and of course his sober garb of gray and rusty black is a poor ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... out of the garden. He mounted his horse and allowed it to take him wherever it would, for he had no idea where the Wise Woman of the Wood lived, and one way was as good as another. Towards sundown, a blackbird hopped on to his horse's head and sang to him, and something in its song so reminded the King of Lady Whimsical's laughter that he put out his hand to caress it. No sooner did he touch it, however, than it turned into a squirrel, and scampered away from him ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... of a hen blackbird without any trace of feathers on its neck or back is reported by a Worcester ornithologist. The attempt on the part of this bird to follow our ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... park some rooks cawed fussily over the choice of their night quarters. Nearer, a blackbird piped an evening song. They sounded restless and plaintive to the lonely boy, and he hid his face in his hands, covering eyes and ears that he might see nothing, hear nothing. Then into his mind there surged a recollection of the dear old free ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... in a small importing store, going into partnership with one, Ah Yung. The firm ultimately became the great one of "Ah Chun and Ah Yung," which handled anything from India silks and ginseng to guano islands and blackbird brigs. In the meantime, Ah Chun hired out as cook. He was a good cook, and in three years he was the highest-paid chef in Honolulu. His career was assured, and he was a fool to abandon it, as Dantin, ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... name of the Thrush is "Mauvis." It is, of course, included in Professor Ansted's list, but with the Fieldfare, Redwing, and Blackbird, marked as only occurring in Guernsey and Sark. All these birds, however, are equally common in Alderney, Herm, and Jethou. There is also a specimen of each in ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... darkness o'er the world? Why should the heavenly constellations shine? Why should the weather evermore be fine? Why should this rolling ball go whirling round? Why should the noise of mirth and music sound? Why should the sparrow chirp, the blackbird sing, The mountains echo, and the valleys ring, With all that's cheerful, humorous, and glad, Now that my heart is smitten and ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... the time looking carefully round for nests. They very soon heard the harsh cry of the jay, who was letting all the inhabitants of the woodlands know that enemies were at hand, and away flew the birds. The blackbird was the first to take the alarm from the jay, and away he flew, crying, "Kink, kink, kink," as he started from his nest in a great ivy tod on an old pollard-tree. The lads soon found the nest, and peeped ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... Fosbrook so; and the boys tried to drag her on with a promise of a blackbird's nest; but she thought them unfeeling to such woeful distress, and first tried to reason with Bessie, then to soothe her, till at last, finding all in vain, she thought bed the only place for the child, and led her into the house, helped her, still shaking with sobs, to undress, ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the haw an' the rowan tree, Wild roses speck our thicket sae breery; Still, still will our walk in the greenwood be— O, Jeanie, there 's naething to fear ye! List when the blackbird o' singing grows weary, List when the beetle-bee's bugle comes near ye, Then come with fairy haste, Light foot, an' beating breast— O, Jeanie, there 's naething ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... back, Frivolity and Show. It is a day of Spring; I want to see my roses blow, And hear the blackbird sing. I wish to prune my apple-trees, And nail my peaches straight; Keep to the causeway, if you please— I've ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... angry scream and chatter at the approach of an enemy, darts the "ousel cock so black of hue, with orange-tawny bill." How dull a lawn would be without his pert movements when he comes down alternately with his russet wife. One blackbird with a broad white feather on each side of his tail haunted Elderfield for two years, but, alas! one spring day a spruce sable rival descended and captivated the faithless dame. They united, chased poor Mr. Whitetail over the high garden hedge, and ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... young man. The light wind bore into the chamber the sweet scents of the early summer, the chief of all of them being the savour of the new-cut grass, for about the wide meadows the carles and queens were awork at the beginning of hay harvest; and late as it was in the day, more than one blackbird was singing from the bushes of the castle pleasance. Ralph sighed for very pleasure of life before he had yet well remembered where he was or what had befallen of late; but as he stood at the window and gazed over the meadows, and the memory of all came back to him, he sighed once more ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... love' de blackbird' nes', De baby love' his mamy's bres', An' raggy-tag, aw spick-an'-span, De ladies loves de ladies' man. I loves to roll my eyes to de ladies! I loves to sympathize wid de ladies! As long as eveh I knows sugah f'om san' I's bound ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... south. At this cliff the Missouri is confined within a bed of two hundred yards; and about four miles to the south east is a large lick and salt spring of great strength. About three miles further is Blackbird creek on the north side, opposite to which, is an island and a prairie inclosing a small lake. Five miles beyond this we encamped on the south side, after making, in the course of the day, thirteen miles. The land on the north is a high rich plain. On the south it ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... a sleek blackbird that had alighted and now set to singing on the topmost twig of a lofty pear-tree near by; and with his first note Jane reappeared. And while we listened, unstirring, to that rich, undaunted voice, I had good opportunity to observe her, and not, I think, without ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... loudly, and at the same moment a huge blackbird flew out of the shrubberies behind them, and flashed across the open space toward the orchard on the other side. It whistled a long, shrill scream of warning. It was bigger by far ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... the blackbird in the corn, The locust in the haying; And, like the fabled hunter's horn, Old ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... parlour with the six mahogany-backed, haircloth-seated chairs, the two narrow arm-chairs, the four ugly mirrors, and the little wire basket full of odds and ends of crockery and foreign coins—covered by the skin of a white blackbird, found on the farm and prepared for stuffing—he looked a very dapper, respectable, personable man. But my Aunt Jen would have none of his compliments on the neatness of the house or the air of ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... silence. A blackbird, evidently attracted by Mrs. Godfrey's clear, resonant voice, had perched on the stone parapet beside them and watched them in bright-eyed curiosity. Then, as Malcolm moved his arm, it flew off, with clucking notes of ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... moments she had Mary's long hair down, and was chattering like a blackbird, wreathing the pearls in and out, and saying a thousand pretty little nothings,—weaving grace and poetry upon the straight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... side, leaving the young women to loiter behind and pick mayflowers. Rhododendrons, orchids, and epigonitis rewarded their search in abundance. From the valley below came up the bleating of goats and the flute-like notes of the blackbird. ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... sometimes depart from their usual habit, and take up with the abandoned nest of some other species. The blue-jay now and then lays in an old crow's-nest or cuckoo's-nest. The crow-blackbird, seized with a fit of indolence, drops its eggs in the cavity of a decayed branch. I heard of a cuckoo that dispossessed a robin of its nest; of another that set a blue-jay adrift. Large, loose structures, like the nests of the osprey and certain ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... season of the year. Continuing our walk, we pass under the rose-crowned aqueduct, and strike into the green avenue that darkens beyond; listening to the distant water bubbling up from the deepest recesses, and to the fitful whistle of blackbird and thrush, as they flit athwart the moss-grown gravel, and perch momentarily on the heads of mutilated termini and statues; whilst the clipt trees vibrate under the wings of others extricating themselves on a piratical cruise against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Chasing the clouds of the night away And bidding the dreams of the dawn depart Over the freshening April blue, Till the blossoms awake to welcome the May, And the world is made anew; And the blackbird sings on the dancing spray With eyes of glistening dew; "Happy, happy, happy day;" For he knows that his love is true; He knows that his love is true, my heart, He knows that his love ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... unlike an orange in complexion, either; he had twinkling gray eyes and a pronounced Roman nose, the numerous freckles upon which were deepened by his funereal dress-coat and trousers. He reminded me of Alfred de Musset's blackbird, which, with its yellow beak and sombre plumage, looked like an ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... valuable teachers. From his happily idle boyhood to the close of his fruitful career, Lowell's loyalty to Cambridge and Harvard was unalterable. Other tastes changed after wider experience with the world. He even preferred, at last, the English blackbird to the American bobolink, but the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue never lost its savor, and in the full tide of his social success in London he still thought that the society he had enjoyed at the Saturday Club was the best society ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... on where you are going," said Professor Jim Crow, for it was the old blackbird who had stopped the little ...
— Little Jack Rabbit and the Squirrel Brothers • David Cory
... from somewhere among the purple shadows of the wood the rich, deep notes of a blackbird came to us, with pauses now and then, filled in with the rustle of leaves and the distant ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... heard her say that she loved birds dearly. Not wild songsters, however, who sing best in their native freedom of the skies, like the spotted-breasted, circle-carolling lark, the thicket-haunting blackbird, and the sweet-throated thrush.—It would have afforded her no pleasure to prison up one of these in a cage. But, a little fledgling that had never known what it was to roam at its own sweet will, and who, when ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... advanced towards the well known spot. The mellow voice of the thrush, and the clear pipe of the blackbird, diversified at intervals with the tender notes of the nightingale, formed the most agreable natural concert. The breast of Delia, framed for softness and melancholy, was filled with sensations responsive to the objects around her, and even the eternal ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... go a-walking to hear the linnets sing, The blackbird and the throstle a-praising Queen and King: It cheers the heart to hear them, to see the leaves unfold, The meadows covered over ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... nuisance. Of small birds there were introduced the house-sparrow, which is too prolific, and is hated by the farmers; the greenfinch, a pest; the bullfinch, a failure. The introduced skylark and the blackbird (alas! poor colonists) are not the joy of New Zealanders—the farmers hate them. The European settlers had the audacity to introduce also the most beautiful and beloved of all birds, our own perfect "Robin Redbreast," and they add want of manners to ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... garden of goodly gifts * And all manner blooms that in wreaths entwine; See the birdies warble on every bough * Make melodious music the finest fine. And each Pippet pipes[FN217] and each Curlew cries * And Blackbird and Turtle with voice of pine; Ring-dove and Culver, and eke Hazar, * And Kata calling on Quail vicine; So fill with the mere and the cups make bright * With bestest liquor, that boon benign;— This site and sources and scents I espy * ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... a jolly person, and he was full of jokes. He sat there in the top of the tall butternut tree, and pretended that he was Mister Blackbird, and he sang Mister Blackbird's song all the way through. Then he said "Meow!" and then he sang a song very much like Robert Robin's "Rain" song, then he said "Meow!" again, and laughed. It made Robert Robin very angry to have Mister Catbird ...
— Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin • Ben Field
... ruled the Arangi in bare legs, a loin cloth, and a sixpenny under-shirt, and ran cannibal blacks back and forth in the blackbird trade with an automatic strapped to his body waking and sleeping and with his head forfeit in scores of salt-water villages and bush strongholds, and who was esteemed the toughest skipper in the Solomons where only men who are tough may continue to live and esteem toughness, blinked with sudden ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... The blackbird sings upon the budding spray, I hear the clarion tones of chanticleer, And robins chirp about from break of day,— All pipe their carols to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the group seen so lately in sunlight assembled, 'Mid those walks over which the laburnum-bough trembled, And the deep-bosom'd lilac, emparadising The haunts where the blackbird and thrush flit and sing, The keenest eye could but have seen, and seen only, A circle of friends, minded not to leave lonely The bird on the bough, or the bee on the blossom; Conversing at ease in the garden's green bosom, Like those who, when Florence ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... baskets on their heads. These baskets contained live fowl. In one a large melancholy turkey meditated on his approaching fate: in another, two of lighter disposition swung their long necks about and viewed the scene. One of these baskets was as pretty as the blackbird pie of famous memory. In it sat eight chickens of an age to make their debut on the platter, all settled into a fluffy, soft-gray cushion, out of which their little heads and necks and half-raised wings peeped and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... disastrous, and she shrank from creating more trouble by her impetuosity. To hurt this man would be serious. No one could hurt Charles except himself; and even then he would always wake up in the morning singing and whistling like a happy boy or a blackbird in a ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... tiger moth's deep damasked wings" before the enraptured eyes of the noble poet. These two caterpillars and a few house-flies are all I saw, heard, or felt, by day or night, of the native fauna of England, except a few birds,—rooks, starlings, a blackbird, and the larks of Salisbury Plain just as they rose; for I lost sight of them almost immediately. I neither heard nor saw the nightingales, to my great regret. They had been singing at Oxford a short time before my visit ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Victor. "I hear a blackbird." He sorted his papers, for he was writing. "I will write an ode on your venture. What shall ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... found, however, that his particular mission in life is to purge his master's garden of all birds. This keeps him busy. As soon as he sees a blackbird on the lawn he is in full cry after it. When he gets to the place and finds the blackbird gone he pretends that he was going there anyhow; he gallops round in circles, rolls over once or twice, and then trots back again. "You didn't really ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... a casual song of the lark in a fresh morning, of the blackbird and thrush at sunset, or the monotonous wail of the yellow-hammer, the silence of birds is now complete; even the lesser reed-sparrow, which may very properly be called the English mock-bird, and which kept up a perpetual clatter with the notes of the sparrow, the swallow, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... bismuto. Bit (piece) peco. Bit (horse) enbusxajxo. Bite mordi. Bitter akra—ema. Bitters vermuto. Bitumen terpecxo. Bivouac bivako. Blab babili. Black nigra. Blackboard nigra tabulo. Black-currant nigra ribo. Black pudding sangokolbaso. Blackbird merlo. Blacken nigrigi. Blackguard sentauxgulo. Blacking ciro. Blackish dubenigra. Blacksmith forgxisto. Bladder veziko. Blade (grass) trunketo. Blade (knife) trancxanto. Blamable mallauxdinda. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... to remark that he could not fathom what Aggie meant by that expression, as it certainly was not appropriate to the domestic circle at The Towers, consisting, as it did, of one rheumatic Anglo-Indian worm, and one able-bodied blackbird. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... singing, a blackbird hopped on to the parapet, looked enquiringly in, his yellow bill moving from side to side, and (p. 097) fluttered away; a lark rose into the heavens warbling for some minutes, a black little spot on the grey clouds; he ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... charm was such, that by keeping it about me the first female name I should hear was destined, I believed in my soul, to be that of my future wife.* Sweet was the song of the thrush, and mellow the whistle of the blackbird, as they rose in the stillness of evening over the "hirken shaws" and green dells of this secluded spot of rural beauty. Far, too, could the rich voice of Owen M'Carthy be heard along the hills and meadows, as, with a little chubby urchin ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... is quite as careful of her employer's things as of her own. The full amount of her mischiefs often does not appear at once, as she is glib of tongue, adroit in apologies, and lies with as much alertness and as little thought of conscience as a blackbird chatters. It is difficult for people who have been trained from childhood in the school of verities,—who have been lectured for even the shadow of a prevarication, and shut up in disgrace for a lie, till truth becomes a habit of their souls,—it is very difficult for people so ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a harsh nor a heavy one; there was a certain geniality in the appearance of things. The weather had changed to fair; the day, one of the last of the treacherous May-time, was warm and windless, and the air had the brightness of the hawthorn and the blackbird. If it was sad to think of poor Touchett, it was not too sad, since death, for him, had had no violence. He had been dying so long; he was so ready; everything had been so expected and prepared. There were tears in Isabel's eyes, but they were ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... round him as if to make a close inspection of his figure, then began to tease him. At first I thought it was all in fun—merely animal spirit which in birds often discharges itself in this way in little pretended attacks and fights. But the blackbird had no play and no fight in him, no heart to defend himself; all he did was to try to avoid the strokes aimed at him, and he could not always escape them. His spiritlessness served to inspire the chaffinch with greater boldness, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... feathered songsters sing before February it is a sign of hard, ungenial weather. This applies particularly to the blackbird and throstle. The ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... who offered a series of twelve preliminary observations on the Theology of Rupert of Deutz, whereupon his host promptly put out his candle, leaving that man of supernatural memory to go to bed in the dark; and as Carmichael pulled up the blind in his own room, the day was breaking and a blackbird had begun to sing. Next afternoon Beaton had resumed his observations on Rupert, but now they were lying among the heather on the side of Glen Urtach, and Carmichael was asleep, while MacQueen was thinking that they would have a good appetite ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... breeze moved the vine-leaves of the arbour; the ripe barley swayed at intervals; a blackbird was singing. And, casting glances around them, they relished this ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... stream about eight yards wide, whose source is in the adjoining prairies on the south. At this cliff the Missouri is confined within a bed of two hundred yards; and about four miles to the south east is a large lick and salt spring of great strength. About three miles further is Blackbird creek on the north side, opposite to which, is an island and a prairie inclosing a small lake. Five miles beyond this we encamped on the south side, after making, in the course of the day, thirteen miles. The land on the north is a high rich plain. On the south it is also even, of a good quality, ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... walk, we pass under the rose-crowned aqueduct, and strike into the green avenue that darkens beyond; listening to the distant water bubbling up from the deepest recesses, and to the fitful whistle of blackbird and thrush, as they flit athwart the moss-grown gravel, and perch momentarily on the heads of mutilated termini and statues; whilst the clipt trees vibrate under the wings of others extricating themselves on a piratical cruise against a whole ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing younger sons had nothing on me, I found myself master and owner of a schooner so well known that she shall remain historically nameless. I was running blackbird labour from the west South Pacific and the Coral Sea to the plantations of Hawaii and the nitrate mines ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... shoot. He insisted, however, that only one gun should be taken out at a time, to diminish the danger of accidents. After that the boys took out their guns by turns when they went to work of a morning, and many a dead blackbird soon attested to their ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... birds, the sole speaker occasionally drops into English, or I should never have understood what was going on. He may be a blackbird or thrush, but I doubt it, because I know all their remarks, while his are new to me. If A.A.M. heard them he would probably tell me they were those of a "Blackman's Warbler," and I should have believed him—once. Hardly now, after he has so airily exposed his title as an authority; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... Bishop of Carlisle has been with me two days at Strawberry, where we saw the eclipse(572) to perfection: -not that there was much sight in it. The air was very chill at the time, and the light singular; but there was not a blackbird that left off singing for it. In the evening the Duke of Devonshire came with the Straffords from t'other end of Twickenham, and drank tea with us. They had none of them seen the gallery since it was finished; even the chapel was new to the Duke, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... himself, for there was plenty of time before five o'clock, and he stopped every few moments to examine some wayside plant, and to listen with the ardor of a true lover of nature to the merry voices of the thrush and blackbird singing a ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... playing with the golden meshes of her hair. No doubt he was fully conscious of his own inferiority, for he did not speak again. It was for him to wait. The silence deepened; in the heart of the wood a blackbird was piping madly ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... blackbird, sitting on a fir tree, began to sing; the horses scudded away as fast as they could, and there was once ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... will leave the crypt, and guard the entrance from without; allowing none, on any pretext, to pass within. When a blackbird whistles you will return, lift the stretcher, and pass with it, as heretofore, from the Cathedral to ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... Thrush, Lark, Blackbird, and Nightingale, and one or two choristers more. These are connected with the pheasants in their speckledness, and with the pies in pecking; while the nightingale leads down to the smaller ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... up in the air and gave a bird-call. Birds gathered and she swooped amongst them pulling feathers off their backs and out of their wings. Soon there was a heap of feathers on the ground—pigeons' feathers and pie's feathers, crane's and crow's, blackbird's and starling's. The King of Ireland's Son quickly gathered them into his bag. The falcon flew to another place and gave her bird-call again. The birds gathered, and she went amongst them, plucking their feathers. The King's Son gathered them and the blue falcon flew to another ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... except the murmuring caws of the rooks in their nests, and the chattering shriek of a startled blackbird. The servant from behind ran up the steps and thundered at the door; it was opened, a broad line of light shone out, some figures appeared, and a man in livery came forward to open the carriage door, but to Aurelia's inexpressible horror, his face was perfectly black, with negro features, rolling ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a mellow but mocking blackbird's note which very nearly brought the Duke of Kent, and half-a-dozen of his compeers, upon them. However, they passed on, in spite of royal instructions to "stop and search—some of these little she-vixens are ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... overrunning the thicket with its emerald leaves and luxuriant flowers. And here and there, silvering the bushes, the elder offered its snowy tribute to the summer. All the insect youth were abroad, with their bright wings and glancing motion; and from the lower depths of the bushes the blackbird darted across, or higher and unseen the first cuckoo of the eve began its continuous and mellow note. All this cheeriness and gloss of life, which enamour us with the few bright days of the English summer, make the poetry in an angler's life, and convert every idler at heart into a moralist, and ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rich. Why, there ain't an organ in the county can down her high B!" Then, warmed by my brother's sympathy, he fumbled in his pocket, and found a sheet of note-paper. Upon this he had written a quatrain that he proposed to read to us au clair de la lune. The lines were addressed: "To My Own Blackbird." ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... forest suddenly encompassed them. The morning was pretty far advanced; the merry birds twittered in their dun covert, brushing the dewdrops from the boughs with their restless wings. The thrush and blackbird poured forth a more melancholy note; whilst the timid rabbit, scared from his morning's meal, rushed by and sought his burrow. The wood grew thicker, and the sunbeams that shot previously in broad slopes across their path soon became as lines of intensely-chequered light piercing ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... birds see him first, jay and blackbird and thrush; They shriek at his coming and curse him, each one; With the clay of the vale on his pads and his brush, It's the Fallowfield fox and he's pretty near done; It's a couple of hours since a whip tally-ho'd him; Now the rookery's stooping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... prayer of the holy child, at which the broken parts came together and were made whole; that once on receiving his food in a basket, let down to his otherwise inaccessible cell, the devil vainly tried to vex him by breaking the rope; that once Satan, assuming the form of a blackbird, nearly blinded him by the flapping of his wings; that once, too, the same tempter appeared as a beautiful Roman girl, to whose fascinations, in his youth, St. Benedict had been sensible, and from which ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... February my joy came home. I remember that it was exquisite weather, the blackbird singing his passionate song in the bare boughs fit to break your heart with its beauty. There were high, white, shining clouds on the blue, and the mountains were grey-lavender. The wall-flower clumps were in bloom ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... entered his great shell and paddled off, using the ends of his wings; and then came Ko-ko-kas, the Owl, doing the same; and, Kosqu', the Crane, Wee-sow-wee-hessis, the Bluebird, Tjidge-is-skwess, the Snipe, and Meg-sweit-tchip-sis, the Blackbird, all came sailing proudly after. Even the tiny A-la-Mussit, the Humming-Bird, had a dear little boat, and for him the good Partridge had made a pretty little paddle, only that some thought it rather large, for it was almost an inch long. And Ishmegwess, ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... innocuous. A neighbouring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for some good hints) killed and opened a female viper about the 27th May: he found her filled with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of those of a blackbird; but none of them were advanced so far towards a state of maturity as to contain any rudiments of young. Though they are oviparous, yet they are viviparous also, hatching their young within their bellies, and then bringing them forth. Whereas snakes lay chains of eggs every summer ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... interesting to note also in the first case that in her wildest delirium during an acute attack she lived through episodes of her past life. One example may be given. In the course of her delirium she thought that a "blackbird" had flown to her, touched her left wrist and taken away all her vitality. This depended on an experience of her going to Germany when a girl and meeting a young German officer whom she did not like. A few years later she went ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... were compassionate: both musicians were unhappy, inasmuch as they strove not for honour nor of their free choice, but for their safety and of hard necessity. I should have admired them more if they had pleased men, not beasts. Such solitude were far better suited to birds, to blackbird and nightingale and swan. The blackbird whistles like a happy boy in distant wilds, the nightingale trills its song of youthful passion in the lonely places of Africa, the swan by far-off rivers chants the music of old age. But he who would produce a song that shall profit ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... kind of blackbird, smaller than the former, and speckled very much like a starling. Indeed, I believe it is a species of that bird; for it frequents marshes, and lodges amongst the reeds at night. This bird is also destructive ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... warming their backs in the sunshine scampered in alarm from their logs. Lizards blinked at him. Moccasin snakes darted wicked forked tongues at him and then glided out of reach of his tomahawk. The frogs had stopped their deep bass notes. A swamp-blackbird rose in fright from her nest in the saw-grass, and twittering plaintively fluttered round and round over the pond. The flight of the bird worried Wetzel. Such little things as these might attract the attention ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... they would linger there, listening to the pleading passion of the blackbird's note, the thrush's call to joy and hope. He loved her gentle ways. From the bold challenges, the sly glances of invitation flashed upon him in the street or from some neighbouring table in the cheap luncheon room he had always ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... no end. There were game birds and song birds, from the handsome pheasants to the modest little partridges, the royalists and the puritans of the woods, from the love-lorn wood-pigeon, cooing in the tall firs, to the thrush and the blackbird, making long hops as they quartered the ground for grubs; and the robin, the linnet, and little Jenny Wren all lived there in riotous plenty of worms and snails; and nearer to the great house the starlings and jackdaws shot down in a great hurry from the holes in old trees ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... that scorn the mounting wings, The happy heights of souls serene, I wander where the blackbird sings, And over bubbling, shadowy springs, The ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... The blackbird scraped his feet clean on a splinter of wood that was there. The splinter broke off and, when the bird flew away, there was quite a little heap of earth left. Next day a swallow came and next a lark and gradually quite a ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... clock, there was not such an accurate and unimpeachable instrument in existence as the little thermometer which hung behind the door. There was not a bird of such methodical and business-like habits in all the world, as the blind blackbird, who dreamed and dozed away his days in a large snug cage, and had lost his voice, from old age, years before Tim first bought him. There was not such an eventful story in the whole range of anecdote, as Tim could ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... palaces so fair, Built for the royal dwelling, In Scotland far beyond compare, Linlithgow is excelling; And in its park, in jovial June, How sweet the merry linnet's tune, How blithe the blackbird's lay; The wild-buck bells from ferny brake, The coot dives merry on the lake; The saddest heart might pleasure take To see all nature gay. But June is, to our sovereign dear, The heaviest month in all the year: Too well his cause of grief you know, June saw his father's overthrow, Woe to the ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... at him hard, and waited a minute. She opened the door, peered out, trembled again, crossed the threshold, and returned with the body of a blackbird. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... carelessness that had the laugh of ridicule in it. He loved to make her voice go high and shouting and defiant with laughter. The baby was dark-skinned and dark-haired, like the mother, and had hazel eyes. Brangwen called him the blackbird. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... town made for us bows of lancewood, and arrows of poplar, tipped with spikes of iron. With these we could not only split our "willow wand" at 80 yards distant, but the more skilful deemed an arrow hardly worth having until it had been baptized in the blood of blackbird or pigeon, and some of the neighbouring pigeon cotes suffered accordingly. The writer was presented with a bow made of bamboo, and arrows said to be poisoned, which a great traveller, then residing in Horncastle, had brought from the South Sea Islands. He lent ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... arrow he drew from the wounded deer was unlike the arrows in his own quiver. Another's stray shot had killed the deer. Patkasa had hunted all the morning without so much as spying an ordinary blackbird. ...
— Old Indian Legends • Zitkala-Sa
... in the garden, and one robin. I loved the robin best of all. His song was not so beautiful as the blackbird's or so mellow as the thrush's; but they hid and ran away from me, whilst the robin sought me out and stayed with me and sang me, all to myself, a little, tiny, gentle song of which I never grew tired. If I stayed quite still, ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush—sadder ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... brite and fair. Potter Goram can stuf birds, so they look jest like they was alive. he stufed a red winged blackbird so good that the cat et it and dide. and then Potter he skun the cat and stufed her. i can skin the cat on the horizondle bar, ...
— 'Sequil' - Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First • Henry A. Shute
... little Ella, what the flowers Said to you then, to make your cheek so pale; And why the blackbird in our laurel bowers Spoke to you, only: and the poor pink snail Fear'd less your steps than those of the May-shower It was not strange those creatures loved you so, And told you all. 'Twas not so long ago You were yourself a bird, or else a flower. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... quite well finish her packing in the morning. She sat down at the desk and set to work to arrange her papers. It was a warm spring evening, and the window was open. A crowd of noisy sparrows seemed to be delighted about something. From somewhere, unseen, a blackbird was singing. She read over her report for Mrs. Denton. The blackbird seemed never to have heard of war. He sang as if the whole world were a garden of languor and love. Joan looked at her watch. The first gong would sound in a few minutes. She pictured the dreary, silent dining-room with its ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... sun flung a carpet of gold across the sea. Phyllis's hair was tinged with it. Little waves tumbled lazily on the beach below. Except for the song of a distant blackbird running through its repertory before retiring for the night, ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... dead bird, of a species common in the desert, with white head or cap, and white tail, except the upper feathers; all the rest, legs and bill, black. It is about the size of a lark, but has a head like a blackbird. We supposed the one found had died from want of water, though it may have been killed by the mother ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... he was clearly the oracle of the boys, delivering his sentiments in the manner of one accustomed to dictate to all in and about the stables. In addition to this, there was an indescribable, but ludicrous salvo to his dignity, in the way of surliness. Some one had engaged him to carry a blackbird to town, and caused him to wait. On this subject he sang a Jeremiad in the true cockney key. "He didn't want to take the bla-a-a-ck-bud; but if the man wanted to send the bla-a-a-ck-bud, why ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... shadow of the elms, Di perched on the fence, and Nan leaning far over the gate with her hand above her eyes and the sunshine touching her brown hair with gold. He waved his hat and turned away; but the music seemed to die out of the blackbird's song, and in all the summer landscape his eyes saw nothing but the little ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... this kind bounty did dispense; For suddenly it was withdrawn, And all the birds were left forlorn, In a hard time of frost and snow, Not knowing where for food to go. He would no longer give them bread, Because he had observ'd (he said) That sometimes to the window came A great blackbird, a rook by name, And took away a small bird's share. So foolish Henry did not care What became of the great rook, That from the little sparrows took, Now and then, as 'twere by stealth, A part of their abundant wealth; Nor ever more would feed his sparrows. Thus ignorance ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... L'Alleg. 98, where the same expression is used. There is a close resemblance between the language of this song and lines 91-99 of L'Allegro. Milton's own spelling of 'holiday' is 'holyday,' which shows the origin of the word. The accent in such compounds (comp. blue-bell, blackbird, etc.) falls on the adjective: it is only in this way that the ear can tell whether the compound forms (e.g. holiday) or the separate words (e.g. holy ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... a negative personality; and it is certain that he has told a very entertaining story. There are in this volume battle, murder, sudden death, outlaws, cowboys, bears, American politics, and the author's views on the English blackbird, all handsomely illustrated, and the price is only what you would (or would not) pay for a stall to see a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... the Templar, pointing to one of these nymphs, who seemed afraid of observation, and partly concealed herself behind the casement, as she chirped to a miserable blackbird, the tenant of a wicker prison, which hung outside on the black brick wall.—"I know the face of yonder waistcoateer," continued the guide; "and I could wager a rose-noble, from the posture she stands in, that she has clean head-gear and a soiled ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... many species, the sexes of which differ greatly from each other, are certainly monogamous. In Great Britain we see well-marked sexual differences, for instance, in the wild-duck which pairs with a single female, the common blackbird, and the bullfinch which is said to pair for life. I am informed by Mr. Wallace that the like is true of the Chatterers or Cotingidae of South America, and of many other birds. In several groups I have not been able ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... way in which I was captured. I was in love, as it is called; not only did she appear to me a perfect being, but I considered myself a white blackbird. It is a commonplace fact that there is no one so low in the world that he cannot find some one viler than himself, and consequently puff with pride and self-contentment. I was in that situation. I did not marry for money. Interest ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... to wear it out, And therefore bore it not about, Unless on holy-days, or so, As men their best apparel do. 50 Beside, 'tis known he could speak GREEK As naturally as pigs squeek; That LATIN was no more difficile, Than to a blackbird 'tis to whistle: Being rich in both, he never scanted 55 His bounty unto such as wanted; But much of either would afford To many, that had not one word. For Hebrew roots, although they're found To flourish ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... he fly; he had a large caterpillar in his beak, and no doubt his nest or the young from it were in the hedge. In feeding the young birds the old ones always perch first at a short distance, and after waiting a minute proceed to their fledgelings. Should a blackbird come at full speed across the meadow and stay on a hedge-top, and then go down into the mound, it is certain that his nest is there. If a thrush frequents a tree, flying up into the branches for a minute and then descending ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... and carried out to the fullest possible extent in accordance with the ante mortem wishes of the dead, were the obsequies of Blackbird, the great chief of the Omahas. The account is ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... for instance, and always to be really doing something, and to think that whatever he was doing was a thing of vast importance. Peter became very clever at helping the birds to build their nests; soon he could build better than a wood-pigeon, and nearly as well as a blackbird, though never did he satisfy the finches, and he made nice little water-troughs near the nests and dug up worms for the young ones with his fingers. He also became very learned in bird-lore, and knew an east wind from a west wind by ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... is another high bluff, not many miles from the cedar post of poor Floyd, that is well known as the burial-place of Blackbird, a famous chief of the O-ma-haw tribe; the manner of his burial was extremely strange. As I was pulling up the river, a traveller told me the story; and, when I had heard it, we pushed our canoe into a small ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... the flute came quick, rather brilliant like a call-note, or like a long quick message, half command. To her it was like a pure male voice—as a blackbird's when he calls: a pure male voice, not only calling, but telling her something, telling her something, and soothing her soul to sleep. It was like the fire-music putting Brunnhilde to sleep. But the pipe ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... neighborhood of Ronen and in the valley of Monville, the blackbird was for some time proscribed. The beetles profited well by this proscription; their larvae, infinitely multiplied, carried on their subterranean labors with such success, that a meadow was shown me, the surface of which was completely dried up, every herbaceous root ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... by now, and the moon was up. To their right, on the crest of a rise some two hundred yards away, a low wood stood out black against the sky. As they passed it, a blackbird rose up screaming, and a brace of wood-pigeons ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... came next from a young pig in a dish placed before Mr. Dinsmore, and the song of the blackbird from a pie Grandma ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... Poor Blackbird! If only he had not spoken! The Cat with a great leap sprang upon him and without even giving him time to say "Oh!" ate him in a mouthful, feathers ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... his war-dress, with silver cross on his breast and bow and arrows in his hand; then, the weight on the trunk being released, the sapling sprang back to its place and afterward rose to a commanding height, fitly marking the Indian's tomb. Chief Blackbird, of the Omahas, was buried, in accordance with his wish, on the summit of a bluff near the upper Missouri, on the back of his favorite horse, fully equipped for travel, with the scalps that he had taken hung to ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... pie was opened, the birds began to sing; And wasn't this a dainty dish to set before the king? The king was in the parlour, counting out his money; The queen was in the kitchen, eating bread and honey; The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes, There came a little blackbird and nipt ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies - Without Addition or Abridgement • Munroe and Francis
... subgens was divided into four sections: 1, Hawk people, under the chief Standing Hawk (now dead). 2, Blackbird people, under the chief Wajina-gahiga. B, Starling or Thunder people. ...
— Siouan Sociology • James Owen Dorsey
... and furrowed face; the dead leaves fall gently and sadly through the calm, sweet air; grey mists drape the fields and hedges. The migratory birds have left, save a few late swallows; and as I sit at work in the soft, still rain, I can hear the blackbird's melancholy trill and the thin pipe of the redbreast's winter song— the air is full of ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... given toll and tribute to the Northmen, and would no more enrich the lord of Elam with their treasure, but they rebelled against him. Onward the hosts advanced, intent on death. (Loud sang the javelins.) Amid the spears the blackbird, dewy-feathered, croaked in hope of carrion. In multitudes, with steadfast hearts, the warriors hastened till the hosts were gathered from afar, from south and ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... grosbeaks, the orioles, the tanagers, the humming-birds, and many of the sparrows. Instead of the purple and bronzed grackles (the latter are sometimes seen on the plains of Colorado, but are not common), the Rockies boast of Brewer's blackbird, whose habits are not as prosaic as his name would indicate. "Jim Crow" shuns the mountains for reasons satisfactory to himself; not so the magpie, the raven, and that mischief-maker, Clark's nutcracker. All of which keeps the bird-lover from the East in an ecstasy of surprises until ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... any more, but worked quietly and watched the shadow, feeling sure the faint song came from it. Presently she began to hum the tune she caught by snatches; and, before she knew it, she was singing away like a blackbird. Baby stopped crying, and ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... the man, taking off his paper cap and rubbing up his bristly gray hair. 'We call Jack "The Blackbird" among us; he is a famous whistler, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... now tell us, although the days are cold, and the snow not yet gone, that brighter times are coming. The clear concerts of the frogs ring loudly out from marsh and lake, and at this season alone is heard the lay of the wood-robin, and the blackbird. The green glossy leaves of the winter green, whose bright scarlet berries look like clusters of coral on the snow, now seem even brighter than they were—the blue violet rises among the sheltered moss by the old tree roots, and ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... something wherewith to pay his hospitality, was hastily putting them back, when the man, looking up, caught sight of a bundle of oaten pipes among the miscellaneous wares. He plucked one to him, and in a moment the air was full of tender liquid notes—a thrush's roundelay. Then a blackbird called and his mate answered; a cuckoo cried the spring-song; a linnet mourned with lifting cadence; a nightingale poured ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... With Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, and our own Yeats, one feels that they have all sought shelter from disagreeable actualities in the world of imagination. James Stephens, as he chanted his Insurrections, sang with his whole being. Let no one say I am comparing him with Shakespeare. One may say the blackbird has wings as well as the eagle, without insisting that the bird in the hedgerows is peer of the winged creature beyond the mountain-tops. But how refreshing it was to find somebody who was a poet without a formula, who did not ransack dictionaries ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... whom the kingbird seemed suspicious was a purple crow blackbird, who every day passed over. This bird and the common crow were the only ones he drove away without waiting for them to alight; and if half that is told of them be true, he had ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... the rustle of birds through the branches, and the dreamy murmur of waters lost in deepest woods, and all the fairy echoes whispering when the leaves are motionless in the noonday heat; then followed notes, cool and soft as the drip of summer showers on the parched grass, and then the song of the blackbird sounding as clearly as it sounds in long silent spaces of the evening, and then in one sweet jocund burst the multitudinous voices that hail the breaking of the morn. And the lark, singing and soaring above the minstrel, sank mute and motionless upon his shoulder, and ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... great hall paved with vari-coloured marbles and other precious stones and hung with cages of sandal and aloes wood, full of singing-birds, such as the thousand-voiced nightingale[FN48] and the cushat and the blackbird and the turtle-dove and the Nubian warbler. My heart was ravished by the song of the birds and I forgot my cares and slept in the aviary till the morning. Then I opened the fourth door and saw a great hall, with forty cabinets ranged on either side. ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... laughter, and he put out a hand and tousled the thick curls in his favorite caress. One of the tresses caught in his jewelled ring; and as he bent to unfasten it, he stared at the wavy mass in lazy surprise. It was as soft and rich as the breast of a blackbird, and the fire had laid over it a ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... little path chequered with the shades of aspens and ashes and the most verdant and lively of all the family of trees. Here a broad, rude stone steppeth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into grass and weeds; anon a fresh pathway divergeth, you know not whither. Meanwhile the wild blackbird startles across the way and singeth anew in some other shade. To have seen Fiammetta there, stepping in silk attire, like a flower, and the sunlight looking upon her betwixt the branches! I had not walked (in the body) with Romance ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... by a rustling of the leaves behind her. She paused and looked round fearfully. A blackbird darted out of the hedge and away over the fields. Zelma smiled at her own alarm, and read on, till ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... full of morning sounds as the lads trudged along the Warwick road together. An ax rang somewhere deep in the woods of Arden; cart-wheels ruttled on the stony road; a blackbird whistled shrilly in the hedge, and they heard the deep-tongued belling of hounds far ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... among the common people, is this: you may pass through the whole South of France, as well as the county of Nice, where there is no want of groves, woods, and plantations, without hearing the song of blackbird, thrush, linnet, gold-finch, or any other bird whatsoever. All is silent and solitary. The poor birds are destroyed, or driven for refuge, into other countries, by the savage persecution of the people, who spare no pains to kill, and catch them for their own subsistence. Scarce a sparrow, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... And Columbine—Columbine had a trill of laughter in her voice whenever she spoke to him. He liked to hear her play the guitar and sing soft songs in the twilight. Adam liked it too. He was wont to say that it reminded him of a young blackbird learning to sing. For Columbine was as yet very shy of her own talent. She kept in the shallows, as it were, in dread of what the deep ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... whin's a dusky yellow And the road a rosy white, And the blackbird's call is mellow At the falling of night; And there's honey in the heather Where we'll make our last abode, My tunes and me together At ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... La Fontaine, "is that Vanel, that determined blackbird, knowing that I was coming to Saint-Mande, implored me to bring him with me, and, if possible, to present him ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the crow would eat animal food in any form, and might not be rightly classified as a grain-eating bird, Prof. Stearns said the crow was thus classified by reason of the structure of its crop being similar to that of the finches, the blackbird, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... and business again, after a small playing the truant, for I find that my interest and profit do grow daily, for which God be praised and keep me to my duty. To my office, and anon one tells me that Rundall, the house-carpenter of Deptford, hath sent me a fine blackbird, which I went to see. He tells me he was offered 20s. for him as he came along, he do so whistle. So to my office, and busy all the morning, among other things, learning to understand the course of the tides, and I think I do now do it. At noon Mr. Creed comes to me, and he and I to the ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... I well remember! Dame Nature was just donning her variegated gown of rustic-brown, while fitful airs from the realms of Jack Frost were painting the wild roses and forest leaves in cardinal hue, and the blackbird, thrush and musical nightingale flew low and sang hoarse, but continually, in their assemblages for migration to lands of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... in plenty—a whole tobacco-pipe bowl full, carefully measured out of the old yellow canvas money-bag that did for a shot belt. A starling could be knocked off the chimney with this charge easily, and so could a blackbird roosting in a bush at night. But a woodpigeon nearly thirty yards distant was another matter; for the old folk (and the birdkeepers too) said that their quills were so hard the shot would glance aside unless it came with great force. Very likely the ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... faint grey stole over the distant horizon, and suddenly a cloud reddened before his eyes. The sun was not in sight, but was rising, and sending forerunners before his face. The cattle began to stir, a blackbird burst into song, and before Drumsheugh crossed the threshold of Saunders' house, the first ray of the sun had broken on a peak of ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... picture books, trains of cars, toy pianos; but not one of their playthings was alive, like Piccola's birdling. They were as pleased as she, and Rose hunted about the house until she found a large wicker cage that belonged to a blackbird she once had. She gave the cage to Piccola, and the swallow seemed to make himself quite at home in it at once, and sat on the perch winking his bright eyes at the children. Rose had saved a bag of candies for Piccola, and when she went home at last, with the cage and her dear swallow ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... himself as, after looking vainly for more stray leaves, he trudged on, enjoying the bobolink's song, the warm sunshine, and a comfortable sense of friendliness and safety, which soon set him to whistling as gayly as any blackbird in ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... game... in fact there is a total absence of game.... Animals may be dumb but they are not stupid, so for miles around Tarascon the burrows are empty and the nests abandoned. There is not a quail, not a blackbird, not the smallest rabbit nor even ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Carlton, and 'afterwards'. We could change at my Governor's place into borrowed, stolen, and hired evening-kit, paint the village as scarlet as Sin or a trooper's jacket, and then come home, like the Blackbird, to tea. I am going, and if I can't get 'leaf' I shall return under the bread in the rations-cart. Money's the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... friend of the United States. In General Harrison's day he was United States Indian agent at Fort Wayne, but was killed in the massacre of Fort Dearborn, in 1812, by the faithless bands of Potawatomi under the chief Blackbird. ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... was justified. At the end of his regulation time Harold stopped crying suddenly, like a clock that had struck its hour; and with a serene and cheerful countenance wriggled out of Medea's embrace, and ran for a stone to throw at an intrusive blackbird. ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... fragrant night floated in upon us, and the sounds of the men at their meat or making merry about the township; and whiles we heard the gibber of an owl from the trees westward of the church, and the sharp cry of a blackbird made fearful by the prowling stoat, or the far-off lowing of a cow from the upland pastures; or the hoofs of a horse trotting on the pilgrimage road (and one of ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... thrushes, and starlings. They tore away the seaweed with their strong bills, pitching it right and left behind them in as workmanlike style as any miner, and so boring deep notches into the edge of the bed. When a blackbird had made a good hole he came back to visit it at various times of the day, and kept a strict watch. If he found any other blackbird or thrush infringing on his diggings, he drove him away ferociously. Never were such works ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... sound of the Church bell to their ears through the window, half open to admit the breezy breath of spring; the cawing of the rooks and the song of the blackbird came with it; the sky was clear and blue, the ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and homely as the flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my incurable ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed. Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... flaunting, meek, patient, faithful, saucy, spirited, violet, dahlia, sheep, pansy, ox, dog, horse, rose, gentle, duck, sly, waddling, cooing, chattering, homely, chirping, puss, robin, dove, sparrow, blackbird, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... staircase, at the summit of which you enter Nirvana by means of the "House on the Garden," a glass-house floored with boards and furnished with rustic chairs, a lounge and a writing-table; and here, amid the tree-tops, I write to the music of thrush and blackbird, with restful glances at the sailing clouds or at the sunny weald, that circles for miles around and ends to the south in the "downs" that hide the English Channel. Perhaps it is because my landscape takes in Tennyson's ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... doe awoke, and to the lawn, Begemmed with dew-drops, led her fawn; The gray mist left the mountain side, The torrent showed its glistening pride; Invisible in flecked sky, 35 The lark sent down her revelry; The blackbird and the speckled thrush, Good-morrow gave from brake and bush; In answer cooed the cushat dove Her notes of peace, and rest, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... once, as we do Shakespeare's. La Bruyere passes from mysterious ironies to bold and coarse invective, from ornate and sublime reflections to phrases of a roguish simplicity. He suddenly drops his voice to a shuddering whisper, and the next moment is fluting like a blackbird. The gaiety with which he mocks the ambitions of the rich is suddenly relieved by the dreadful calm with which he reveals the horror of their disappointments. He is never in the same mood, or adopting the same tone, for two ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... quiscula. Redwing Blackbird. Ageloeus phoeniceus. Yellow-Throated Warbler. Dendroica dominica. Baltimore Oriole. Icterus galbula. White-Bellied Nuthatch. Sitta carolinensis. American Robin. Merula ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... reflected in the music of the time. Schubert, that sweetest soul of tears and laughter, understands every shade of wistfulness, and yet again and again in his music it seems as though the universe had become, to quote a lover of his, one immense and glorious blackbird. Mozart, in 'The Magic Flute', as Goethe seems to have recognized, sings the very song of union between the unreflecting joy of the natural man and the strenuous self-devotion of the awakened spirit. Beethoven, greatest of them all, plumbs the lowest depths of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... ye feathered songsters, Lift your praises loud and high, Merry lark, and thrush, and blackbird, In the grove and in the sky Make your music, shame our dumbness, Till ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... the birds love-learned song, The deawy leaves among! For they of ioy and pleasance to you sing, 90 That all the woods them answer, and theyr eccho ring. [* Mavis, song-thrush.] [** Descant, variation.] [@ Ouzell, blackbird.] [$ ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... very much, if you could work as well as she does, and show as strong a pair of arms as she can. I haven't seen a prettier picture for some time than she made of herself this morning, up to the elbows in suds, singing like a blackbird whilst she ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... golden broom To bind thy flowing hair; For thee the eglantine shall bloom, Whose fragrance fills the air. We'll sit beside yon wooded knoll, To hear the blackbird sing, And fancy in his merry troll The ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... thy nest, Robin-redbreast! Sing, birds, in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow! You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow; To give my Love good-morrow Sing birds, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... tender boughs loaded with young fruit, pricked by the sharp claws and beak of the insolent blackbird, complained to the blackbird with pitious remonstrance entreating her that since she stole its delicious fruits she should not deprive it of the leaves with which it preserved them from the burning rays of the sun, and that she should not divest it of its tender ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... might pursue her mission of mercy and succour at night. Thus passed some days, and then Jessica's blood grew restless; the narrow room seemed to her stifling and unendurable, and she pined for the open air, as a caged blackbird ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... comes nearer to my own interpretation. The body of this bird is in colour a mixture of grey and brown, but its tail and wings are most beautifully marked with dark zig-zag bars, which make it very handsome. In size it is between the blackbird and the lark. Like the woodpecker, it has a very long tongue, which is covered with a glutinous matter, and which it inserts into the grass roots or tree bark, in search of its ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Mr. O'Callaghan was told by a country boy that he had seen a blackbird with a topknot; on which Mr. O'C. very judiciously told him to watch it and communicate further with him. After a time the boy told him he had found a blackbird's nest, and had seen this crested bird near it and believed he belonged to it. He continued ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... she cried, "'you must find your fun'—are those the words of the song, Margot?—Oh, look, look!" she pointed joyously to a blackbird on top the swaying maple outside her window. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... smallest interest. That had been disastrous, and she shrank from creating more trouble by her impetuosity. To hurt this man would be serious. No one could hurt Charles except himself; and even then he would always wake up in the morning singing and whistling like a happy boy or a blackbird in ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... of Spring. The blackbird opens his yellow beak, and whistles cool and clear. There is blue magic in the morning; the sky, deep-blue above, melts into white where it meets the hills. The wind waits for you up yonder—will you go to meet it? Ah, stay here! The hedges have put on ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... class lessons on the habits, movements, and foods of common birds, as crow, woodpecker, king-bird, phoebe, blackbird, etc. (See pp. 217-22.) ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... quavering, as ladies do when they practise. The street did not approve of the continuance of the noise; but neighbours are difficult to please, and what would Morgiana have had to do if she had ceased to sing? It would be hard to lock a blackbird in a cage and prevent him from singing too. And so Walker's blackbird, in the snug little cage in the Edgware Road, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sat in his place, looking up at the little girl, who was smiling to herself as she watched the blue dragon-flies dance among the ferns, a blackbird tilt on the alderboughs, and listened to the ...
— Marjorie's Three Gifts • Louisa May Alcott
... the little foster-parents have in all probability no suspicion of the trick that has been played on them. Birds do not take deliberate notice of the size or colour of their own eggs. Kearton somewhere relates how he once induced a blackbird to sit on the eggs of a thrush, and a lapwing on those of a redshank. So, too, farmyard hens will hatch the eggs of ducks or game birds and wild birds can even be persuaded to sit on eggs made of painted wood. Why then, since they are so careless of appearances, should ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... altogether. A dead bird or two were passed, lying in the snow, claws in air and already stiff: a felt and a yellowhammer were side by side at the bottom of the hill. It was like the dead in gay uniforms, lying scattered after an action. A little further on there was a blackbird, to Murphy's very evident glee. He found it at once, and was for carrying it home; it was still warm. But this was no time for fooling. It was already dark and growing darker; the proper thing to do was to keep together and make for home. ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... my head at night: the first thing in the morning, these maestrini would pipe up. But these, even if you can pardon their imprisonment, are for the house. In the garden the wild birds must plant a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that should be almost deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a nightingale down the lane, so that you must stroll to hear it, and yet a little farther, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Carmen What the Swallows Say — An Autumn Song Christmas The Dead Child's Playthings After Writing My Dramatic Review The Castle of Rembrance Camellia and Meadow Daisy The Fellah — A Water-Colour by Princess Mathilde The Garret The Cloud The Blackbird The Flower that Makes the Springtime A Last Wish The Dove A Pleasant ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... birds' nests in our orchard. One day when we were in the orchard we saw a big nest with rags woven in it, and I spied a corner of an embroidered handkerchief that was given me a year ago last Christmas. Papa was up in the tree, and he pulled it out and threw it down to me. I think it was a blackbird's nest. The eggs were green, with dark brown ...
— Harper's Young People, June 8, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... use opposing her once she had fallen in love with Jacopo. He was a handsome, dark fellow, with insinuating manners, and a voice like a blackbird. When the two were together there was no one else in the world for them. He had flamed up with the fierceness of his southern nature: she with the heat of a heart slow to love, and once fired ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... we shall have to speak before we conclude. We will here touch only on one of those which are continually reappearing in Mr. Darwin's pages, in order to illustrate his mode of dealing with them. He finds, then, one of these "inexplicable difficulties" in the fact, that the young of the blackbird, instead of resembling the adult in the colour of its plumage, is like the young of many other birds spotted, and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... A blackbird's nest in the crotch of a small tree suggested to me the most satisfactory guard I have yet found against this greatest of dangers to all exotic, grafted varieties of nut trees. The nest, which enclosed over half of the ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... compassionate: both musicians were unhappy, inasmuch as they strove not for honour nor of their free choice, but for their safety and of hard necessity. I should have admired them more if they had pleased men, not beasts. Such solitude were far better suited to birds, to blackbird and nightingale and swan. The blackbird whistles like a happy boy in distant wilds, the nightingale trills its song of youthful passion in the lonely places of Africa, the swan by far-off rivers chants the music of old ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... a life common to her and all living things had been broken or obscured; and that she walked in an isolation all the more terrible in that she was surrounded by the dumb presence of what she loved. Last year the quick chattering cry of the blackbird, the evening mists over the meadows, the stir of the fading life of the woods, the rustling scamper of the rabbit over the dead leaves, the solemn call of the homing rooks—all this, only last year, went to make up the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes; Down came a blackbird, And pecked ...
— The Little Mother Goose • Anonymous
... I hope, come to myself and business again, after a small playing the truant, for I find that my interest and profit do grow daily, for which God be praised and keep me to my duty. To my office, and anon one tells me that Rundall, the house-carpenter of Deptford, hath sent me a fine blackbird, which I went to see. He tells me he was offered 20s. for him as he came along, he do so whistle. So to my office, and busy all the morning, among other things, learning to understand the course of the tides, and I think I do now do it. At noon Mr. Creed comes to me, and he and I to the Exchange, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... young women to loiter behind and pick mayflowers. Rhododendrons, orchids, and epigonitis rewarded their search in abundance. From the valley below came up the bleating of goats and the flute-like notes of the blackbird. ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... songsters, Lift your praises loud and high, Merry lark, and thrush, and blackbird, In the grove and in the sky Make your music, shame our ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... surely," said the Doctor, "and not 'only a Bobolink,' but the very bird we should be most glad to see—the first of the Blackbird and Oriole family—the harlequin in his ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... their newest dresses. So bright was the goldfinch's wing, that the lark, though she did not dare speak, had no doubt she rouged. The sparrow, brushed and neat, so quiet and subdued in his brown velvet, looked quite aristocratic among so much flaunting color. As for the blackbird he had carefully washed himself in the spring before he came to bathe in the brook, and he glanced round with a bold and defiant air, as much as to say: "There is not one of you who has so yellow a bill, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... wide knotted branches stood out in graceful lines against the clear blue sky, unfolding into a tent overhead; hawks, honey-buzzards and kestrels flew whizzing under the motionless tree-tops; variegated wood-peckers tapped loudly on the stout bark; the blackbird's bell-like trill was heard suddenly in the thick foliage, following on the ever-changing note of the gold-hammer; in the bushes below was the chirp and twitter of hedge-warblers, siskins, and peewits; finches ran ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... rooks cawed fussily over the choice of their night quarters. Nearer, a blackbird piped an evening song. They sounded restless and plaintive to the lonely boy, and he hid his face in his hands, covering eyes and ears that he might see nothing, hear nothing. Then into his mind there surged a recollection of the dear old free days at home, never to come again. ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... Nature, and steers clear of the poetic vagueness in regard to species. A passing description of the brown thrush as "skulking" among the bushes hits that bird to the life. Some remarks on page 119 would seem to be applied by a slip of the pen to the crow blackbird, instead of the cowbird, which has always enjoyed the distinction of being the only American species that disposes of its offspring after the fashion of the cuckoo and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The chapter on Emerson contains ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door. There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of seagulls, ducks, swans, wild geese, secure in the possession of an inexhaustible supply of food, sport and prosper among the reeds. The ostrich, greater bustard, the common and red-legged partridge and quail, find their habitat on the borders of the desert; while the thrush, blackbird, ortolan, pigeon, and turtle-dove abound on every side, in spite of daily onslaughts from eagles, hawks, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... had I Philomela's tongue, The thrush's note, or warbling song Of blackbird, lark, or linnet; I'd then more gratitude display, Striving to raise a sweeter lay, I'd sing the fleeting hours away, Nor silent be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... thousand maidens, Bring the noblest of the hundred, From a thousand unattractive; From the swamp you bring a lapwing, From the hedge you bring a magpie, From the field you bring a scarecrow, From the fallow field a blackbird. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... they strayed, In the leafage dewy and boon, Many a man and many a maid, And the morn was merry June: 'Death is fleet, Life is sweet,' Sang the blackbird in the may; And the hour with flying feet While ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... in the sunshine scampered in alarm from their logs. Lizards blinked at him. Moccasin snakes darted wicked forked tongues at him and then glided out of reach of his tomahawk. The frogs had stopped their deep bass notes. A swamp-blackbird rose in fright from her nest in the saw-grass, and twittering plaintively fluttered round and round over the pond. The flight of the bird worried Wetzel. Such little things as these might attract the attention of some Indian scout. But he hoped ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... render her unfit for her daily task. But now she found that, once more, she had underrated the strength of her own impulses. For some time she resisted, but one day, the sun shone out strong and genial, the budding trees spread their branches to the warm air, a blackbird warbled ecstatically from among the Priory shrubberies, and Hadria passed into the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... it, Hear how Darius reasoned about it. "The birds can fly, an' why can't I? Must we give in," says he, with a grin, "That the bluebird an' phoebe Are smarter'n we be? Jest fold our hands an' see the swaller An' blackbird an' catbird beat us holler? Does the little, chatterin', sassy wren, No bigger'n my thumb, know more than men? Jest show me that! Ur prove't the bat Hez got more brains than's in my hat, An' I'll back down, an' ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... who is a painter; he is the great master of colors, and is named SEPTEMBER. The forest, on his arrival, had to change its colors when he wished it; and how beautiful are the colors he chooses! The woods glow with hues of red and gold and brown. This great master painter could whistle like a blackbird. He was quick in his work, and soon entwined the tendrils of the hop plant around his beer jug. This was an ornament to the jug, and he has a great love for ornament. There he stood with his color pot in his hand, and that was ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... out at once! and let be hurl'd Dark, dread, unmitigated darkness o'er the world? Why should the heavenly constellations shine? Why should the weather evermore be fine? Why should this rolling ball go whirling round? Why should the noise of mirth and music sound? Why should the sparrow chirp, the blackbird sing, The mountains echo, and the valleys ring, With all that's cheerful, humorous, and glad, Now that my heart is smitten and my ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... is also an inhabitant of the Namakagun. The Chippewas, at a hunting camp we passed yesterday, said they had been on the tracks of a moose, but lost them in high brush. Ducks and pigeons appear common. Among smaller birds are the blackbird, robin, catbird, red-headed woodpecker, kingfisher, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... yellow warbler, sometimes called the wild canary, flits through bush and tree and trills its gay notes in town and country. Song-sparrows, thrushes, and bluebirds warble far and near, while the red-winged blackbird makes music in wet, swampy places. The robin, who comes to city gardens in the winter, has a summer home in the mountains or redwoods. There, too, the saucy jay screams and chatters, and flashes his blue wings as he ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... began such music! It sounded like thousands of glass bells, so full, so rich, that I thought the swans were singing. I fancied also that I heard the voice of the cuckoo and the blackbird, and at last the whole forest seemed to join in. I heard children's voices, the sound of bells, and the song of birds; the most glorious melodies—and all came from the elves' maypole, namely, my sausage-peg. I should never have believed that so much ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... And rose each morn at four or five o'clock, To walk abroad, and gain of health a stock; Or listen to the lark's sweet morning lay, As he rose up to greet the King of Day; Or let the lively, thrilling blackbird's song, Charm his fond ear as he walked slow along. Sometimes through well-fenced fields of new-mown hay— Breathing out fragrance—he was wont to stray; Or climb a bill with firm, elastic tread, While Sol ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... the dogs and they do not devour young children. Another proof of that indigence which reigns among the common people, is this: you may pass through the whole South of France, as well as the county of Nice, where there is no want of groves, woods, and plantations, without hearing the song of blackbird, thrush, linnet, gold-finch, or any other bird whatsoever. All is silent and solitary. The poor birds are destroyed, or driven for refuge, into other countries, by the savage persecution of the people, who spare no pains to kill, and catch them for their own subsistence. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... tasted. What other fruits or roots the country affords I know not. Here are hogs and dogs; other land-animals we saw none. The fowls we saw and knew were pigeons, parrots, cockadores, and crows like those in England; a sort of birds about the bigness of a blackbird, and smaller birds many. The sea and rivers have plenty of fish; we saw abundance, though we caught but few, and these were cavallies, ...
— A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... cried La Fontaine, "is, that Vanel, that determined blackbird, knowing that I was coming to Saint-Mande, implored me to bring him with me, and, if possible, to present him to ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... early spring. He stopped frequently to look at them, and he longed to touch them, to hold them in his palm, to put them against his lips. But he looked at his big, hard hands, and then at the flowers, and so, shaking his head, walked on. The blackbird was piping and the missel-thrush singing in one or two of her seven languages, and John felt the spring joy stirring in his own heart to melody. He sat in the singing-pew at St. Penfer Chapel, and he had a noble voice, so he shook the ashes out of his ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... dispersion. So beautiful, so tranquil, looked the old monastic fane, that none would have deemed its midnight rest had been broken by the impious rites of a foul troop. The choir, where the unearthly scream and the demon laughter had resounded, was now vocal with the melodies of the blackbird, the thrush, and other songsters of the grove. Bells of dew glittered upon the bushes rooted in the walls, and upon the ivy-grown pillars; and gemming the countless spiders' webs stretched from bough to bough, showed they were all unbroken. No traces were visible on the sod where the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... killed a blackbird, Joe," continued our visitor; "he has spent half his time in killing slugs and snails, and lugging poor unfortunate worms out of their holes; and it seems to me that the slug or the worm is just as likely to enjoy its life as the greedy blackbird, ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces— We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed, Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed, Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses. Is it that ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... was walking through the forest when he fell into a deep hole. And there he sat and sat, till all at once he began to feel hungry. He started looking round, but could see nothing. Then he looked up, and there he saw a blackbird in the tree above weaving its nest, and he said: "Mr. Blackbird, Mr. Blackbird, what are you doing?" And the blackbird answered: "I'm weaving my nest." "What are you weaving your nest for?" asked the fox. "To bring up my children ...
— More Russian Picture Tales • Valery Carrick
... angry dislike to being duped and cajoled; and, moreover, a strong curiosity to hear and see more of that little passionate bird, fresh from the convent cage. Her gesture and her eyes irresistibly carried him back to old times, though whether to an angry blackbird in the yew-tree alleys at Leurre, or to the eager face that had warned him to save his father, he could not remember with any distinctness. At any rate, he was surprised to find himself thinking so little in comparison about the splendid beauty and winning manners of his discarded spouse, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seen so lately in sunlight assembled, 'Mid those walks over which the laburnum-bough trembled, And the deep-bosom'd lilac, emparadising The haunts where the blackbird and thrush flit and sing, The keenest eye could but have seen, and seen only, A circle of friends, minded not to leave lonely The bird on the bough, or the bee on the blossom; Conversing at ease in the garden's green bosom, Like those who, when Florence was ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... except the nightingale? Must all the lesser voices cease? Lark, thrush and blackbird hold their peace? The woods wait ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... male sparrowhawk in full breeding plumage, which had killed itself, or rather met its death, in a singular manner. The gardener was watering plants in the greenhouse, the door being open, when a blackbird dashed in suddenly, taking refuge between his legs, and at the same moment the glass roof above his head was broken with a loud crash, and a hawk fell dead at his feet. The force of the swoop was so great that for a moment he imagined a stone hurled from a distance ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... to," said the Donkey; and the random chords changed to a crooning melody which wonderfully pleased Buddie, whose opportunities to hear music were sadly few. As for the White Blackbird, he tucked his little head under his ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... quadroon's delicate, high-bred features, her skin almost paler than her young mistress's, her figure like the clove's after a hard winter—the more active that a little meagre—her head small, and its tresses soft as the crow blackbird's plumage, and the loyalty that lay in her large eyes, like strong passion, for her mistress, was turned to pride, and nearly scorn, when they ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... noticed it was Blackbird, a Sac girl, who had been pointed out to his critical eye the previous summer as a beauty. Owen admitted she was not bad-looking for a squaw. Her burnished hair, which had got her the name, was drawn down to cheeks where copper ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... downs were dilated and clear as though seen through crystal. A far company of pines on the high skyline were magnified into delicate inky figures. The vacant sward below them was as lucent as the slope of a vast approaching wave. A blackbird was fluting after a shower, for the sky was transient blue with the dark rags of the squall flying fast over the hill towards London. The thatched roof of a cottage in the valley suddenly flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... was in his counting-house, Counting out his money; The Queen was in the parlor, Eating bread and honey; The maid was in the garden Hanging out the clothes; When up came a blackbird And nipped off her nose. (At this line ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... coyotes, prairie wolves. Birds of all sorts assembled in one long continuous flight. The animal kingdom of that region of forest seemed to have become united in their mutual terror—wolf and hare, coyote and jack-rabbit, hawks and blackbird, prairie chicken and grey-owl; all sworn enemies in time of calm prosperity, but now, in their terror, companions to the last. And all the time, in the growing twilight of smoke, came the distant booming as of the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... there, listening to the pleading passion of the blackbird's note, the thrush's call to joy and hope. He loved her gentle ways. From the bold challenges, the sly glances of invitation flashed upon him in the street or from some neighbouring table in the cheap luncheon room he had always shrunk confused and awkward. Her ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... was mistaken. Sally never did know what she was about,—had no plan or purpose more than a blackbird; and when Moses was gone laughed to think how many times she had made him ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I come so moche to brag—me—on de Riviere des Prairies. It 's a cole October mornin', an' de maple leaf is change Ev'ry color you can t'ink of, from de purple to de green; On de shore de crowd of blackbird, an' de crow begin' arrange For de journey dey be takin' w'en ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond
... our people should have an opportunity of realising these birds and beasts to themselves, but we are shocked at the notion of giving them a similar aid to the realisation of events which, as we say, concern them more nearly than any others, in the history of the world. A stuffed rabbit or blackbird is a good thing. A stuffed Charge of Balaclava again is quite legitimate; but a stuffed Nativity is, ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... brother-in-law to Washington Irving, and shall not soon forget the elegant hospitality of his mansion. He resides about two miles from the town; and his lawn gave us a fine view of the English thrush and blackbird, of which birds there were plenty on the grass. It was so cold that we had to have fires, although the 19th of July. Mr. Vanwart was one of the saved, when the Atlantic was lost in the Sound, November 26, 1846; and he made the kindest inquiries after you and the family, ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... name of Crow Blackbird this fine but unpopular bird is known, unpopular among the farmers for his depredations in their cornfields, though the good he does in ridding the soil, even at the harvest season, of noxious insects and grubs should be set down to ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... gladness in his face, (Silent heart-homage—plant of special grace!) At the lane's entrance, slackening oft his pace, Would Ambrose send a loving look before; Conceiting the caged blackbird at the door, The very blackbird, strain'd its little throat In welcome, with a more rejoicing note; And honest Tinker! dog of doubtful breed, All bristle, back, and tail, but "good at need," Pleasant his greeting to the accustomed ear; But of all welcomes pleasantest, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... snow is uncovering something that has been delayed. In the garden a blackbird made a sudden cry in the hedge. I did ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... (horse) enbusxajxo. Bite mordi. Bitter akra—ema. Bitters vermuto. Bitumen terpecxo. Bivouac bivako. Blab babili. Black nigra. Blackboard nigra tabulo. Black-currant nigra ribo. Black pudding sangokolbaso. Blackbird merlo. Blacken nigrigi. Blackguard sentauxgulo. Blacking ciro. Blackish dubenigra. Blacksmith forgxisto. Bladder veziko. Blade (grass) trunketo. Blade (knife) trancxanto. Blamable ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... do ourselves glorious at the Carlton, and 'afterwards'. We could change at my Governor's place into borrowed, stolen, and hired evening-kit, paint the village as scarlet as Sin or a trooper's jacket, and then come home, like the Blackbird, to tea. I am going, and if I can't get 'leaf' I shall return under the bread in the rations-cart. Money's the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... a rustling of the leaves behind her. She paused and looked round fearfully. A blackbird darted out of the hedge and away over the fields. Zelma smiled at her own alarm, and read on, till ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... rather insolent, you know, At being disappointed in your wish To supersede all warblers here below, And be the only blackbird in the dish. And then you overstrain yourself, or so, And tumble downward like the flying fish Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob, And fall for lack of moisture ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Middle Ages Berti Palazzo, in Florence, Bezzi, Signor A. and Landor Bible, persecution for reading the Bier, open, used in Florence Biglow Papers, Lowell's Biographies, G. Eliot on Birmingham, my return from Blackbird, Song of the Black Down, Tennyson's house at Black Forest, Leweses in the Blackwood's Magazine, Mary Mitford on Blagden, Isa, Miss her poems her death note from Lewes inquires after and George Eliot Blandford Square, Leweses ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... unarticulated hymn, Now walk through rippling waves of wheat, Now sink in mats of clover sweet, Or see before us from the lawn The lark go up to greet the dawn! All birds that love the English sky Throng round my path when she is by; The blackbird from a neighboring thorn With music brims the cup of morn, And in a thick, melodious rain The mavis pours her mellow strain! But only when my Katie's voice Makes all the listening woods rejoice I hear—with cheeks that flush and pale— The passion ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... and from shadowy wood, from dewy grass and flower, stole wafts of perfume, while from some thicket near by a blackbird filled the air with the rich note of his languorous song; but Barnabas frowned only the blacker, and his hand clenched itself on the stick he carried, a heavy stick, that he had cut from the hedge ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... nuts, crab-apples, sloes, watercress, and honey, refuses to go back to the court to which the king, his brother, presses him to return. Now, we have the description of the summer scene, in which the blackbird sings and the sun smiles; now, the song of the sea and of the wind, which blows tempestuously from the four quarters of the sky; again, the winter song, when the snow covers the hills, when every furrow is a streamlet and the wolves range restlessly ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... all and made a rush for the door, where they stood behind Mrs. Steiner, gazing with intense interest at the tall, dark man who had such piercing black eyes and a moustache so large that Fritz told his aunt afterward that it looked as if a blackbird had lighted upon his upper lip and spread its wings ...
— Pixy's Holiday Journey • George Lang
... them.[8] The life of earth is rarely thought of as distinct from the life of man. It is so in a few late epigrams. The complaint of the cicala, torn away by shepherds from its harmless green life of song and dew among the leaves, and the poem bidding the blackbird leave the dangerous oak, where, with its breast against a spray, it pours out its clear music,[9] are probably of Roman date; another of uncertain period but of great beauty, an epitaph on an old bee-keeper who lived alone on the hills with the high woods and pastures for his only neighbours, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... knuckle-dabster of fur or cloth to rest your hand on, but it was considered effeminate, and in the excitement you were apt to forget it, anyway. Marbles were always very exciting, and were played with a clamor as incessant as that of a blackbird roost. A great many points were always coming up: whether a boy took-up or edged beyond the very place where his toy lay when he shot; whether he knuckled down, or kept his hand on the ground in shooting; whether, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... ill-concealed triumph; and plunging his hand into his game-bag, the chasseur produces—a phthisical snipe, a wood pigeon, an extenuated quail, and perhaps something which you at first take for a deformed blackbird, but which turns out to be a water-hen. As far as our own observations go, we do aver this to be a very handsome average of a French sportsman's day's shooting. If by chance he has knocked down a red-legged ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... little horsehair trunk which she had packed to take to Blossy's, looking in her time-worn silk gown like a rusty blackbird, and, like a bird, she bent her head first to one side and then the other, surveying Abe in his "barrel clothes" with ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... team and my dray too, Wid a whip like a flail and such gaiters, Ohone! But the bullocks, as they eyed me, they seemed for to say too, “You may do your best, Paddy, we’re blest if we go.” “Gee whoa! Redman! come hither, Damper! Hoot, Magpie! Gee, Blackbird! Come ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... green and bright, and rich in fruity treasure, I've heard the blackbird with delight repeat his merry measure; The ballad was a lively one, the tune was loud and cheery, And yet with every setting sun I ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... striking plumage are the Bluejay, the Bluebird, the Baltimore Oriole, the Scarlet Tanager, the Cedar Waxwing, and Red-winged Blackbird. ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... bullet! A bullet? Nonsense—it's a blackbird! Curious how similar the sound was! The blackbirds and the birds of softer song, the countryside and the pageant of the seasons, the intimacy of dwelling-rooms, arrayed in light—Oh! the war will end soon; we shall go back for good to our own; wife, children, or to her who is at once wife ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... depart from their usual habit, and take up with the abandoned nest of some other species. The blue-jay now and then lays in an old crow's-nest or cuckoo's-nest. The crow-blackbird, seized with a fit of indolence, drops its eggs in the cavity of a decayed branch. I heard of a cuckoo that dispossessed a robin of its nest; of another that set a blue-jay adrift. Large, loose structures, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... Sir Thomas Armstrong was deep in the scheme. If the discreditable witnesses examined against Lord William Russell are to be believed, a plot had been concocted by a few desperate men to assassinate "the Blackbird and the Goldfinch"—as the conspirators called the King and the Duke of York—as they were in their coach on their way from Newmarket to London. This plan seems to have been the suggestion of Rumbold, a maltster, who lived in a lonely moated farmhouse, called Rye House, about ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had been fortunate in his model, and he admitted that: to see that thin, olive-complexioned girl with fine delicate features and blue-black hair lying close about her head like feathers—she wore her hair as a blackbird wears his wing—compelled one to paint; and after admiring the face I admired the black silk dress he had painted her in, a black silk dress covered with black lace. She wore grey pearls in her ears, and pearls upon ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... by the woodland That hangs upon the hill; Hark! the cock is tuning His morning clarion shrill; And hurriedly awaking From his nest amid the spray, Cheerily now, the blackbird, Whistling, greets the day. For ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... from the blue, Above the barley fields at Loo, The blackbird whistles loud and clear Upon the hills at Windermere; But oh, I simply LOVE the way Our organ-grinder ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... adventure, listening to the spring-time chorus of the birds, lazily and listlessly watching a bough that bent and waved its fan of foliage across my face, or the twinkle of the tireless kingfisher flashing down-stream in loops of light, when a blackbird lit on a branch hard by my left hand, and, all unconscious of an audience, began to pour forth his rapture to ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cattle, and women with large round baskets on their heads. These baskets contained live fowl. In one a large melancholy turkey meditated on his approaching fate: in another, two of lighter disposition swung their long necks about and viewed the scene. One of these baskets was as pretty as the blackbird pie of famous memory. In it sat eight chickens of an age to make their debut on the platter, all settled into a fluffy, soft-gray cushion, out of which their little heads and necks and half-raised wings peeped and turned and fluttered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... should not be easily discovered. In some nests, hair, wool, and rushes are cleverly interwoven. In others, the parts are firmly fastened by a thread, which the bird makes of hemp, wool, hair, or, more commonly, of spiders' webs. Other birds—as, for instance, the blackbird and the lapwing—after they have constructed their nests, plaster the inside with mortar; they then stick upon it, while quite wet, some wool or moss to give warmth; but all alike construct their nests so as ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... bursting into leaves, and the hedges already clothed with their vernal livery; the mountains covered with flocks of sheep and tender bleating wanton lambkins playing, frisking, and skipping from side to side; the groves resound with the notes of blackbird, thrush, and linnet; and all night long sweet Philomel pours forth her ravishingly delightful song. Then, for variety, we go down to the nymph of Bristol spring, where the company is assembled before dinner; so good natured, so free, so easy; and there ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... increases. But I don't complain of that. Just think, these are not birds of passage; they do not leave us at the first cold blast, to find a warmer climate; the least we can do is to recompense them by feeding them when the weather is too severe! Several know me already, and are very tame. There is a blackbird in particular, and a blue tomtit, that ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... lustily in a young tree as she began her task; a blackbird answered from somewhere among the hawthorns with a ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... signalized by an artillery salute from Fort Douglas, which resounded through the wretched ruins of the houses burnt the previous year, and over the fields deserted by the Colonists and left to the chattering blackbird and the howling wolf. Almost every race of people—however small—has its bard. Among the Bois-brules was the son of old Pierre Falcon, a French-Canadian, of some influence among the natives. This young ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... dark brown. It is difficult to distinguish male from female birds when young; but the darkest generally are males. Their food consists of German paste, bread, meat, and bits of apple. The same treatment as given for the thrush (See par. 2456) applies to the blackbird. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... divine weather. The Bishop of Carlisle has been with me two days at Strawberry, where we saw the eclipse(572) to perfection: -not that there was much sight in it. The air was very chill at the time, and the light singular; but there was not a blackbird that left off singing for it. In the evening the Duke of Devonshire came with the Straffords from t'other end of Twickenham, and drank tea with us. They had none of them seen the gallery since it was finished; even the chapel was new to the Duke, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... with his sensitive nature—who can fathom the profound depths of his soul now stirred by two such entrancing sights as the high-smoking blackbird-pie won by his own prowess, and the little monarch for whose sake all this was brought about? The delicious smell excites him like draughts of rich old wine, and all the soul within him bubbles up exultingly, and he improvises on the moment. Joyfully ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... hither, through the sky. Turtle-doves and linnets, fly! Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay, Hither, hither, haste away! One and all, come help me quick, Haste ye, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... shrank from creating more trouble by her impetuosity. To hurt this man would be serious. No one could hurt Charles except himself; and even then he would always wake up in the morning singing and whistling like a happy boy or a blackbird in a cherry-tree ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... innumerable crossed their path at every point; snakes were seen gliding out of their way—a fortunate tendency on the part of most snakes!—and the woods resounded with the singing of the yapu, a bird something like a blackbird, with yellow tips to its wings, and somewhat like the mocking-bird in that it imitated every other bird in the forest. Whether there is jealousy between the yapu and the parrot we have not been able to ascertain, but if birds are like men in their sentiments, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... powers. Set the man who has been accustomed to make engines of one type, to make engines of another type without any intermediate course of training or instruction, and he will make no better figure with his engines than a thrush would do if commanded by her mate to make a nest like a blackbird. It is vain then to contend that the ease and certainty with which an action is performed, even though it may have now become matter of such fixed habit that it cannot be suddenly and seriously modified without rendering the whole performance abortive, is any argument against that action ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... claws in air and already stiff: a felt and a yellowhammer were side by side at the bottom of the hill. It was like the dead in gay uniforms, lying scattered after an action. A little further on there was a blackbird, to Murphy's very evident glee. He found it at once, and was for carrying it home; it was still warm. But this was no time for fooling. It was already dark and growing darker; the proper thing to do was to keep together and make ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... a general rule, during the early part of the rains (June to August), laying usually three or four eggs of a bright greenish-blue colour. The nest itself recalls that of the Blackbird, but it is frequently very clumsily made. On the 21st June last a boy brought me a nest of this species containing eight eggs. Two, if not three, of this clutch are easily separable from the others, being more oval and somewhat ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... which came searching along among the grasses and pieces of wood thrown carelessly aside against the wall could see into the room. Robins, of course, came every morning, perching on the sill and peering in with the head held on one side. Blackbird and thrush came, but always passed the window itself quickly, though they stayed without fear within a few inches ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... this circumstance so called. The selaya, or punei andu, another variety, has the body and wings of deep crimson, with the head, and extremity of its long indented tail, white; the legs red. It lives on the worms generated in the decayed part of old trees, and is about the size of a blackbird. Of the same size is the burong sawei, a bird of a bluish black colour, with a dove-tail, from which extend two very long feathers, terminating circularly. It seems to be what is called the widow-bird, and is ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... a hen blackbird without any trace of feathers on its neck or back is reported by a Worcester ornithologist. The attempt on the part of this bird to follow our ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... since, in the neighborhood of Ronen and in the valley of Monville, the blackbird was for some time proscribed. The beetles profited well by this proscription; their larvae, infinitely multiplied, carried on their subterranean labors with such success, that a meadow was shown me, the surface of which was completely dried up, every herbaceous root was consumed, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... times the nest of the Carashue, which is built of dried grass and slender twigs, and lined with mud; the eggs are coloured and spotted like those of our blackbird, but they are considerably smaller. I was much pleased with a brilliant little red-headed mannikin, which I shot here (Pipra cornuta). There were three males seated on a low branch, and hopping slowly backwards and forwards, near to one ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... dry, became as dull and homely as the flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my incurable ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed. Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be fluting in the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unfrequent sight is to see bare-footed peasant children waiting for their turn to cross the gangway which leads to the New World. Perhaps they have nothing with them but "a pot of shamrock," or a little mountain thrush or orange-billed blackbird, in a wicker cage, to make friends with "beyant the herring-pond." It is very curious, but very Irish, that they do not at all seem to want the sympathy that is lavished upon them by the onlookers. When they are leaving their native place, the "neighbours" hold an "American wake," ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... kitchen door shut in his face. Would the stork also have gone away thoughtfully scratching his head with one of those long, compass-like legs of his, and muttering to himself. And here, incidentally, I fell a-wondering how the stork had carried me. In the garden I had often watched a blackbird carrying a worm, and the worm, though no doubt really safe enough, had always appeared to me nervous and uncomfortable. Had I wriggled and squirmed in like fashion? And where would the stork have taken me to then? Possibly to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... statue-fair Now the low wind may lift her hair, Motionless in lip and limb; E'en the fearful mouse may skim O'er the window-sill, nor stir From the crumb at sight of her; Through the lattice unheard float Summer blackbird's evening note;— E'en the sullen foe would ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... very neat figure and rather under the middle size, never out of the way and never in it, a face that pleased everybody and that all children took to, a habit of going about singing as cheerily as a blackbird, ...
— The Wreck of the Golden Mary • Charles Dickens
... into the skulls of the pampootied boys from Aran, they to be kings of France or of Germany, till they'd go lift their head to the clouds and go knocking all before them. And the police it is likely laughing with themselves, as if listening to the talk of the blackbird would be perched ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... girls here were still shyer than their Cree cousins, but they were not a whit less lovely. They were not dumpy like so many Indian girls, but were slight of build, and willowy of motion. Their hair was long and black, but it was as fine as silk, and shone like the plumage of a blackbird. There was not that oily swarthiness in the complexion, which makes so many Indian women hideous in the eyes of a connoisseur of beauty; but the cheeks of these girls were a pale olive, and sometimes, when they were ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... carol of the bird,—as the mew of the Cat-Bird, the lamb-like bleating of the Veery and his impatient yeoick, the chaip of the Meadow-Lark, the towyee of the Chewink, the petulant psit and tsee of the Red-Winged Blackbird, and the hoarse cooing of the Bobolink. And with some of our most familiar birds the variety of notes is so great as really to promise difficulties in the American department of the bird-lexicon. I have watched two Song-Sparrows, perched near each other, in whom the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... off again, to startle—as he had been startled himself—a blackbird or thrush suddenly awakened from its roost, or hear the loud flapping of a wood-pigeon beating through the ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... suspected Mr. ROOSEVELT of a negative personality; and it is certain that he has told a very entertaining story. There are in this volume battle, murder, sudden death, outlaws, cowboys, bears, American politics, and the author's views on the English blackbird, all handsomely illustrated, and the price is only what you would (or would not) pay for a stall to see a musical comedy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... effect of Pott's face, shown through the cloth that Sam has put over his head. The onions have got detached from the hank hung to the ceiling, and are tumbling on the combatants, and—a capital touch this—the blackbird, whose cage has been covered over to secure its repose, is shown in b dashing against the bars. We might ask, however, what does the cook there, and why does she ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... different material, the stockings silk, the breeches satin, the doublet soft Flanders velvet. Golden-yellow puffs and slashes stood forth in beautiful relief against the darker stuff. Even the knots of ribbon on the breeches and shoes were as yellow as a blackbird's beak. Delicate lace trimmed the neck and fell on the hands, and a clasp of real gems confined the black and yellow ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Peter was right; the creature was a lady. She had a soft, throaty voice, like a blackbird when it talks to itself, and oh, a creamy accent! Miss Rolls would have given anything to extract it, like pith, from the long white stem in which it seemed to live. She would have been willing to pay well for it, and for Miss Child's length of limb, so necessary to show off the latest ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... was a jolly person, and he was full of jokes. He sat there in the top of the tall butternut tree, and pretended that he was Mister Blackbird, and he sang Mister Blackbird's song all the way through. Then he said "Meow!" and then he sang a song very much like Robert Robin's "Rain" song, then he said "Meow!" again, and laughed. It made Robert Robin very angry to have ...
— Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin • Ben Field
... capital. The Londoner knows its charm when he feels his tread on the softening swards of the Vale of Health, or, pausing at Richmond under the budding willow, gazes on the river glittering in the warmer sunlight, and hears from the villa-gardens behind him the brief trill of the blackbird. But the suburbs round Paris are, I think, a yet more pleasing relief from the metropolis; they are more easily reached, and I know not why, but they seem more rural,—perhaps because the contrast of their repose with the stir left behind, of their redundance of leaf and ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sponger bound for Nassau; its blackbird crew spoke English and they willingly helped the strangers overside, laughing and shouting in a child-like display of excitement. How firm, how grateful was the feel of that stout deck! How safe the schooner's measured roll! O'Reilly's knees gave way, he clutched with strained ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush—sadder and stranger than any nightingale—played for us, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... "Blackbird and thrush, in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow, You pretty elves, amongst yourselves, Sing my fair love good-morrow. To give my love good-morrow, Sing birds, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Mistah Buzzard came dropping down out of the blue, blue sky and took a seat on a convenient dead tree, where he could see all that went on. Ol' Mistah Buzzard began to grin as soon as he saw that tin pail on Buster's neck. Then came others,—Redtail the Hawk, Scrapper the Kingbird, Redwing the Blackbird, Drummer the Woodpecker, Welcome Robin, Tommy Tit the Chickadee, Jenny Wren, Redeye the Vireo, and ever so many more. They came from the Old Orchard, the Green Meadows, and even down by the Smiling Pool, for the voices of Sammy Jay and Blacky the Crow carried ...
— The Adventures of Buster Bear • Thornton W. Burgess
... emperors," or spread "the tiger moth's deep damasked wings" before the enraptured eyes of the noble poet. These two caterpillars and a few house-flies are all I saw, heard, or felt, by day or night, of the native fauna of England, except a few birds,—rooks, starlings, a blackbird, and the larks of Salisbury Plain just as they rose; for I lost sight of them almost immediately. I neither heard nor saw the nightingales, to my great regret. They had been singing at Oxford a short time before my visit to that place. The only song I heard was that which I have ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... faithful, saucy, spirited, violet, dahlia, sheep, pansy, ox, dog, horse, rose, gentle, duck, sly, waddling, cooing, chattering, homely, chirping, puss, robin, dove, sparrow, blackbird, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... At dusk the squalid toad was seen, Hopping and crawling o'er the green; The whirling wind the dust obeys, And in the rapid eddy plays; The frog has changed his yellow vest, And in a russet coat is dressed. Though June, the air is cold and still, The mellow blackbird's voice is shrill. My dog, so altered in his taste, Quits mutton-bones on grass to feast; And see yon rooks, how odd their flight, They imitate the gliding kite, And seem precipitate to fall, As if they felt the piercing ball. 'Twill surely rain, I see with sorrow, Our jaunt ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... blue and clear, there was scarce a breath of air, and the morning was already hot; no worse than yesterday sang the birds in the bushes; but as she looked across the river, where, forsooth, the alders grew thick about the pool's edge, a cock blackbird, and then another, flew out from the close boughs, where they had been singing to their mates, with the sharp cry that they use when they are frighted. Withal she saw the bush move, though, as aforesaid, the morning was without wind. She ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... enjoy the delightful sensation the shade produced: there out of its power I could best appreciate the sun shining in splendour on the wide green hilly earth and in the green translucent foliage above my head. In the upper branches a blackbird was trolling out his music in his usual careless leisurely manner; when I stopped under it the singing was suspended for half a minute or so, then resumed, but in a lower key, which made it seem ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... he spoke to a grey bird, about the size of a blackbird, which sat on a branch close above his head. This creature is called by the fur-traders a whisky-John, and it is one of the most impudent little birds in the world! Wherever you go throughout the country, there you find whisky-Johns ready to receive and welcome you, as if they were the owners ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... exasperated Musset. He was annoyed, and declared that a woman out of sorts was very trying. There are good reasons for believing that he had found her very trying for some time. He was very elegant and she a learned "white blackbird." He was capricious and she a placid, steady bourgeois woman, very hard-working and very regular in the midst of her irregularity. He used to call her "personified boredom, the dreamer, the silly woman, the nun," when he did not use terms which we cannot transcribe. The climax was when ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... of the flute came quick, rather brilliant like a call-note, or like a long quick message, half command. To her it was like a pure male voice—as a blackbird's when he calls: a pure male voice, not only calling, but telling her something, telling her something, and soothing her soul to sleep. It was like the fire-music putting Brunnhilde to sleep. But the pipe did not flicker and sink. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... every open space young leaves flashed, golden-green, on soot-blackened branches of chestnut, plane, and lime. And there were flowers everywhere—in squares and window-boxes and parks; in florists' and milliners' windows; in the baskets of flower-sellers and in women's hats. The paper-boy—blackbird of the London streets—whistled a livelier stave. Girls hurried past smiling at nothing in particular. They were glad ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... that I shall begin to sing again," replied Nancy. "I'm sure if Corbett was only once settled on shore in a nice little cottage, with a garden, and a blackbird in a wicker cage, I should try who could sing most, the ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... cataji subgens was divided into four sections: 1, Hawk people, under the chief Standing Hawk (now dead). 2, Blackbird people, under the chief Wajina-gahiga. B, Starling or Thunder people. 4, Owl and ...
— Siouan Sociology • James Owen Dorsey
... young of allied species resemble one another much more than the mature forms. The stripes on the young Lion, the spots on the young Blackbird, are well-known cases; and we find the same law prevalent among the lower animals, as, for instance, among Insects and Crustacea. The Lobster, Crab, Shrimp, and Barnacle are very unlike when full grown, but in their young stages ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... nest, Robin-redbreast! Sing, birds, in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow! You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow; To give my Love good-morrow Sing birds, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... said, in the same slow, hopeless voice. "I forgot you men don't come down here very often and that my driver never has anything to say to anybody. Why, it's the Blackbird mine over across the divide—on the east spur. Bad, old fashioned mine she was, with crawlin' ground. Lime streaks all through the formation and plenty of water. Nobody quite knows how it happened. There was a big slip over there a few days ago on the four-hundred-foot level. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... fane, that none would have deemed its midnight rest had been broken by the impious rites of a foul troop. The choir, where the unearthly scream and the demon laughter had resounded, was now vocal with the melodies of the blackbird, the thrush, and other songsters of the grove. Bells of dew glittered upon the bushes rooted in the walls, and upon the ivy-grown pillars; and gemming the countless spiders' webs stretched from bough to bough, showed they were all unbroken. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... so fair, Built for the royal dwelling, In Scotland far beyond compare, Linlithgow is excelling; And in its park, in jovial June, How sweet the merry linnet's tune, How blithe the blackbird's lay; The wild-buck bells from ferny brake, The coot dives merry on the lake; The saddest heart might pleasure take To see all nature gay. But June is, to our sovereign dear, The heaviest month in all the year: Too well his cause of grief you know, June ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... Hubbard, who claimed the crow would eat animal food in any form, and might not be rightly classified as a grain-eating bird, Prof. Stearns said the crow was thus classified by reason of the structure of its crop being similar to that of the finches, the blackbird, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... there, hopping about and saying pleasant things to every one, for he was a great favorite. Gorgeous Goldfinch was there, in fine feather; and little Blackbird, who was then as white as snow. There were the proud Peacock and the silly Ostrich, the awkward Penguin and the Dodo, whom no man living has ever seen. Likewise there were the Jubjub Bird and the Dinky Bird, and many other curious varieties that one never finds described in ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... Marie, who was within six weeks of being eighteen years of age, as she never failed to mention. Her love affair with Jacques had its birth by moonlight in the garden of an open air ball, to the strains of a shrill violin, a grunting double bass, and a clarinet that trilled like a blackbird. Jacques met her one evening when gravely walking around the space reserved for the dancers. Seeing him pass stiffly in his eternal black coat buttoned to the throat, the pretty and noisy frequenters of the place, who knew him by sight, used to say amongst themselves, "What is that undertaker ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... the little negros from the cabins knew to whom each of these belonged. In spring, parties of young girls and youths came out from town for fishing parties and picknicked in the lawn amid the dandelions and under the song of the blackbird; during the summer, for days at a time, other gay company filled the house; of autumns there were nutting parties in the russet woods. Other guests also, not young, not gay. Aaron Burr was entertained there; there met for counsel the foremost Western leaders in his magnificent conspiracy. More ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... woke, feeling as if some one had called me. The house was still as an empty church. A blackbird was singing on the lawn. I said to myself, "I will go and tell them I am ashamed, and will do whatever they would have me do!" I rose, and went straight up the stairs ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... its joys for him, and we let him loose in the plain below. I also picked up a dead bird, of a species common in the desert, with white head or cap, and white tail, except the upper feathers; all the rest, legs and bill, black. It is about the size of a lark, but has a head like a blackbird. We supposed the one found had died from want of water, though it may have been killed by the mother ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... wind bore into the chamber the sweet scents of the early summer, the chief of all of them being the savour of the new-cut grass, for about the wide meadows the carles and queens were awork at the beginning of hay harvest; and late as it was in the day, more than one blackbird was singing from the bushes of the castle pleasance. Ralph sighed for very pleasure of life before he had yet well remembered where he was or what had befallen of late; but as he stood at the window and gazed over the meadows, and the memory ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... I have found, on examination, that it is perfectly innocuous. A neighbouring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for some good hints) killed and opened a female viper about the 27th May: he found her filled with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of those of a blackbird; but none of them were advanced so far towards a state of maturity as to contain any rudiments of young. Though they are oviparous, yet they are viviparous also, hatching their young within their bellies, and then bringing them forth. Whereas snakes ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... bring my quotations to a close with the following, which seeks to prove the contrary. Dr. C. B. GARRETT ("The Human Voice," J. and J. Churchill, London, 1875, p. 17) says, "It is recorded that the larynx of a blackbird was removed by severing the windpipe just below it; that the poor 'thing continued to sing, though in a feebler tone.' This proves that notes can be formed behind the instrument and before the ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... roots for the pot, that our men saw and tasted; what other fruits or roots the country affords I know not; here are hogs and dogs, other land animals we saw none; the fowls we saw and knew were pigeons, parrots, cocadores, and crows, like those in England; a sort of birds about the bigness of a blackbird, and smaller birds many. The sea and rivers have plenty of fish; we saw abundance, though we catched but few, and these were cavallies, yellow-tails, ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... summer this morning; the trees are blackening out of their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the hoarfrost of daisies of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear, already beginning to 'stint his pipe of mellower days' - which is very apposite (I can't spell anything to-day - ONE p or TWO?) and pretty. All the same, we have been having shocking weather - ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and fair. Potter Goram can stuf birds, so they look jest like they was alive. he stufed a red winged blackbird so good that the cat et it and dide. and then Potter he skun the cat and stufed her. i can skin the cat on the horizondle bar, ...
— 'Sequil' - Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First • Henry A. Shute
... sing overhead; or we have Marban, who, rich in nuts, crab-apples, sloes, watercress, and honey, refuses to go back to the court to which the king, his brother, presses him to return. Now, we have the description of the summer scene, in which the blackbird sings and the sun smiles; now, the song of the sea and of the wind, which blows tempestuously from the four quarters of the sky; again, the winter song, when the snow covers the hills, when every furrow ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... trained ear, but keen feeling and taste for bird songs. He was quick to express preferences, and at once picked out the song of the English blackbird as being the best of the bird songs we heard. I have always had the same feeling about the blackbird's song. I do not say it is better than the songs of American birds, which I have not heard, and I think Colonel Roosevelt thought one or two of the American bird songs were ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... enough to me; And if you doubt it, Hear how Darius reasoned about it. "The birds can fly an' why can't I? Must we give in," says he with a grin. "That the bluebird an' ph[oe]be Are smarter'n we be? Jest fold our hands an' see the swaller An' blackbird an' catbird beat us holler? Doos the little chatterin', sassy wren, No bigger'n my thumb, know more than men? Just show me that! Ur prove 't the bat Hez got more brains than's in my hat. An' I'll back down, an' not till then!" He argued further: "Nur I can't see What's th' use o' wings to a bumble-bee, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... and mountain-ashes; higher up, their wide knotted branches stood out in graceful lines against the clear blue sky, unfolding into a tent overhead; hawks, honey-buzzards and kestrels flew whizzing under the motionless tree-tops; variegated wood-peckers tapped loudly on the stout bark; the blackbird's bell-like trill was heard suddenly in the thick foliage, following on the ever-changing note of the gold-hammer; in the bushes below was the chirp and twitter of hedge-warblers, siskins, and peewits; ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... world but for whose salvation she was responsible. No doubt she had put up a hard fight for him and had every reason to be satisfied, though Gabrielle shared the honours of the mother's triumph in her own defeat. We sat there talking until all the birds were silent, but a single blackbird that made a noise in the shrubbery like that of two pebbles knocked sharply together; until the young people on the tennis court could no longer see to play, and the tall Californian poppies at the back of the herbaceous border that was her ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... a whistle of peculiar volume, mellowness, and flexibility was heard. The whistler was trilling 'Come lasses and lads' in tones as delightful as a blackbird's. ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... arm, she started for her walk. As soon as she was out of sight she began to run. Presently she stopped and began whistling "The Wearing of the Green," which was responded to in a moment by another voice, sweet as that of a blackbird. She looked to right and left, and presently saw a pair of laughing black eyes looking down at her from beneath the shelter of ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... weather. The Bishop of Carlisle has been with me two days at Strawberry, where we saw the eclipse(572) to perfection: -not that there was much sight in it. The air was very chill at the time, and the light singular; but there was not a blackbird that left off singing for it. In the evening the Duke of Devonshire came with the Straffords from t'other end of Twickenham, and drank tea with us. They had none of them seen the gallery since it was finished; even the chapel was new to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... birds digest all they eat?—To determine whether seeds would lose their vitality in passing through the digestive organs of birds, Kerner von Marilaun fed seeds of two hundred and fifty different species of plants to each of the following: blackbird, song thrush, robin, jackdaw, raven, nutcracker, goldfinch, titmouse, bullfinch, crossbill, pigeon, fowl, turkey, duck, and a few others; also to marmot, horse, ox, and pig, making five hundred and twenty separate experiments. As to ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... it; I said that he had been fortunate in his model, and he admitted that: to see that thin, olive-complexioned girl with fine delicate features and blue-black hair lying close about her head like feathers—she wore her hair as a blackbird wears his wing—compelled one to paint; and after admiring the face I admired the black silk dress he had painted her in, a black silk dress covered with black lace. She wore grey pearls in her ears, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... novel of Ivanhoe. A carpenter in the town made for us bows of lancewood, and arrows of poplar, tipped with spikes of iron. With these we could not only split our "willow wand" at 80 yards distant, but the more skilful deemed an arrow hardly worth having until it had been baptized in the blood of blackbird or pigeon, and some of the neighbouring pigeon cotes suffered accordingly. The writer was presented with a bow made of bamboo, and arrows said to be poisoned, which a great traveller, then residing in Horncastle, had brought ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... breast and bow and arrows in his hand; then, the weight on the trunk being released, the sapling sprang back to its place and afterward rose to a commanding height, fitly marking the Indian's tomb. Chief Blackbird, of the Omahas, was buried, in accordance with his wish, on the summit of a bluff near the upper Missouri, on the back of his favorite horse, fully equipped for travel, with the scalps that he had taken hung ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... dream of moody mind, That lists a dirge i' the blackbird's singing; That in gusts hears Nature's own voice complain, And beholds her tears in the gushing rain; When low clouds congregate blank and blind, And Winter's snow-muffled arms are clinging Round Autumn's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... it get beyond the first bar of "Come into the garden, Maud." Ill as I was, I remember being roused to something like a flicker of animation when I was shown an exceedingly seedy and shabby-looking blackbird with a broken leg in splints, which its master (the same bird-fancying gentleman) assured me he had bought in Melbourne as a great bargain for only ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... and imposing person; a face that all declared "fine," and "noble;" a large and glowing chestnut eye; a serene and inspiring presence; and hair so dark, that it reflected at times stray tints of purple, and was lustrous and smooth as a blackbird's wing, He was scrupulous in the arrangement of his attire, and still there was a studied contrivance of modest dignity about it all, that attracted attention, and set ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... aware, sir"—he was always scrupulous to assume knowledge on the part of his hearer, no matter how abstruse or technical the subject; it was a phase of his inherent courtesy—"was intended to represent not the cuckoo, but the blackbird. It had a double pipe for the hours, 'Pit-weep! Pit-weep!' and ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I, 'The man forlorn Hears Earth send up a foolish noise aloft.' 'And what'll he do? What'll he do?' scoff'd The Blackbird, standing, in an ancient thorn, Then spread his sooty wings and flitted to the croft With cackling laugh; Whom I, being half Enraged, called ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... murderous brutality to their poor children. There is a terrible reckoning coming for the "Gipsy man," who can chuckle to his fowls, and kick, with his iron-soled boot, his poor child to death; who can warm and shelter his blackbird, and send the offspring of his own body to sleep upon rotten straw and the dung-heap, covered over with sticks and rags, through which light, hail, wind, rain, sleet, and snow can find its way without let or hinderance; who ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... "I heard my father say he wouldn't take four hundred dollars for Blackbird. And the other animals must be worth at least a hundred and fifty dollars apiece. You know they always had pretty good ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... her side, keeping pace with her flying Indian pony. How beautiful and fresh the picture of her remained in his memory!—the soft white dress she wore, her black hair streaming over her shoulders, her dark eyes flashing delight, her merry laugh rivalling the trill of the blackbird which flew over their heads chattering for very joy. Before him lay the pretty brook with its rustic bridge reflecting itself in the clear water as in a mirror. That path along the bank led down to the willows where the big mossy stones lay in the stream and the silvery salmon ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the land, The time would surely be That brought our Wealden blackbird's note Across the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... bird song. What Ernest called the dawn's enchantment was just ending. Blackbird and robin, oriole and mocking bird, piped full-throated from every cactus. To Ernest this was the one redeeming touch to the desert's austerity. To Roger it was the crowning of an almost unbearable charm. The sun wheeled in full glory over the ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... eastwards. A faint grey stole over the distant horizon, and suddenly a cloud reddened before his eyes. The sun was not in sight, but was rising, and sending forerunners before his face. The cattle began to stir, a blackbird burst into song, and before Drumsheugh crossed the threshold of Saunders' house, the first ray of the sun had broken on a peak of ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... eyes again were his to do with what he would. Later Doctor Lanning came in and she roused to hear the news about the snow. Between Sleepy Cat and Bear Dance two passenger trains were stalled, and on Blackbird hill the snow was reported four feet deep ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... have taken coachmen seriously, or to have regarded them as responsible and civilized men. Abuse of the railway from a pastoral point of view is obsolete. There are millions of grown persons in England to whom the far sound of the train is as pleasantly suggestive as the piping of a blackbird. Again—is not that Lord Worthington getting out of the train? Yes, that one, at the third platform from this. ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... opened window pane, Each morning in this month of May A blackbird sings in dulcet strain Two liquid notes, which seem to say ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... (piece) peco. Bit (horse) enbusxajxo. Bite mordi. Bitter akra—ema. Bitters vermuto. Bitumen terpecxo. Bivouac bivako. Blab babili. Black nigra. Blackboard nigra tabulo. Black-currant nigra ribo. Black pudding sangokolbaso. Blackbird merlo. Blacken nigrigi. Blackguard sentauxgulo. Blacking ciro. Blackish dubenigra. Blacksmith forgxisto. Bladder veziko. Blade (grass) trunketo. Blade (knife) trancxanto. Blamable ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... next from a young pig in a dish placed before Mr. Dinsmore, and the song of the blackbird from a pie Grandma Elsie ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... for days, growing ever colder and colder as it rained. The sun came out at last, but it shone in a wintry sort of way,—like a duty smile,—as if light, not heat, were its object. A keen wind blew the dead leaves hither and thither in a wild dance that had no merriment in it. A blackbird flew under an old barrel by the wayside, and, ruffling himself into a ball, remarked despondently that feathers were no sort of protection in this kind of climate. A snowbird, flying by, glanced in at the barrel, and observed that anybody who minded ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... lightly about it. But now that the marriage is a thing accomplished, it is all right. I had destined my niece for another sphere than a painter's world. However, when you can't get a thrush, eat a blackbird, as ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... for a long time over The railing, thinking of a vast number of things, mostly vague, flitting things, looking into the clear depths of the brook, and listening to the delicious liquid note of a blackbird swinging on the willow. Red lilies starred the grass with fire, and goldenrod and chicory grew everywhere; purple and orange ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... a thankful gladness in his face, (Silent heart-homage—plant of special grace!) At the lane's entrance, slackening oft his pace, Would Ambrose send a loving look before; Conceiting the caged blackbird at the door, The very blackbird, strain'd its little throat In welcome, with a more rejoicing note; And honest Tinker! dog of doubtful breed, All bristle, back, and tail, but "good at need," Pleasant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... 'tis eerie, when winter is over, And birds should be glinting owre forest and lea, When the lint-white and mavis the yellow leaves cover, And nae blackbird sings loud frae the tap ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... birds of striking plumage are the Bluejay, the Bluebird, the Baltimore Oriole, the Scarlet Tanager, the Cedar Waxwing, and Red-winged Blackbird. ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... that King Day shines in all his glory through the mist by day, and the moon and stars appear in their brilliancy in the evenings; now that, as if in harmony with the artistic rendering of Easter anthems by your choirs, the thrush and the blackbird twitter forth the disappearance of the foggy winter with its snow, sleet and wet; now that the flocks of fleecy sheep, which for the past four months have been in hiding and conspicuous by their absence, come forward again and spread triumphantly ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... have her out of the way, for he knew how soft-hearted his wife was. She never could turn away a tramp or a beggar from her door; she gave food and shelter to all stray dogs and cats, and a blackbird in a cage outside the window bore witness to her kind nature. She had rescued a nest full of fledglings from some cruel boys and had tried to bring them up by hand. Only one survived, and although ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... site of Muskrat Castle, and is near the last resting-place of Hetty Hutter and her mother. And far to the southwest lies a long, low, curving beach jutting sickle-shape into the lake. As a favored haunt of muskrats, it was once called Muskrat Cove, and now Blackbird Bay. Just beyond lies Fenimore, the home of Cooper's ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... and I hanker for the ways Which people read of in the psalms and preachers paraphrase— The grassy fields, the leafy woods, the banks where I can lie And listen to the music of the brook that flutters by, Or, by the pond out yonder, hear the redwing blackbird's call Where he makes believe he has a nest, but hasn't one at all; And by my side should be a friend—a trusty, genial friend, With plenteous store of tales galore and natural leaf to lend; Oh, how I pine and hanker for the gracious boon of spring— For then I'm ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... not, little Ella, what the flowers Said to you then, to make your cheek so pale; And why the blackbird in our laurel bowers Spoke to you, only: and the poor pink snail Fear'd less your steps than those of the May-shower It was not strange those creatures loved you so, And told you all. 'Twas not so long ago You were yourself a bird, or else a flower. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... of the flimsy Italian style while still a boy. At twenty-one he had already written his "Tancredi" and the opera buffa, "The Italians in Algiers." His best work (besides "William Tell") was "The Barber of Seville." Other works are "Cinderella" (La Cenerentola), "The Thieving Blackbird" (La Gazza Ladra), "Moses," and "The Lady of the Lake." These operas were mostly made up of parts of others that were failures, a la Hasse. An engagement being offered him in London, he went there with his wife, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... the good-night song of the blackbird, before he goes to sleep among the golden laburnum boughs; can almost smell the good-night sigh of the flowers, as they nod their sleepy heads and swing lazily in the ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... to my linnets from the hedges green, Blackbird and lark and thrush and dove, And every nightingale And cuckoo tells its tale, And ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... evaire did see a forest. Pretend you can see it. It was spring before the leaves had come but the tops of the trees were swaying and the branches had the colors you see when you dream—and the wind was warm and sweet and sighing. And on a maple tree a blackbird whistled—so—and in the shining melted snow-pools the little green frogs made this kind of noises—and down in the old stone stable two little new lambs were crying—it was a wonderful spring! You must pretend you can see Margot sitting in a gray stone ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... day, Chasing the clouds of the night away And bidding the dreams of the dawn depart Over the freshening April blue, Till the blossoms awake to welcome the May, And the world is made anew; And the blackbird sings on the dancing spray With eyes of glistening dew; "Happy, happy, happy day;" For he knows that his love is true; He knows that his love is true, my heart, He knows that his ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... night floated in upon us, and the sounds of the men at their meat or making merry about the township; and whiles we heard the gibber of an owl from the trees westward of the church, and the sharp cry of a blackbird made fearful by the prowling stoat, or the far-off lowing of a cow from the upland pastures; or the hoofs of a horse trotting on the pilgrimage road (and one of our watchers would ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... Crow Blackbird. Quiscalus quiscula. Redwing Blackbird. Ageloeus phoeniceus. Yellow-Throated Warbler. Dendroica dominica. Baltimore Oriole. Icterus galbula. White-Bellied Nuthatch. Sitta carolinensis. American Robin. Merula migratoria. Phoebe. ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... and nearly as bald as an orange, and not unlike an orange in complexion, either; he had twinkling gray eyes and a pronounced Roman nose, the numerous freckles upon which were deepened by his funereal dress-coat and trousers. He reminded me of Alfred de Musset's blackbird, which, with its yellow beak and sombre plumage, looked like ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Swipes! Jenny, take the yellow jug with the three beef-eaters on it, and go to the third cask from the door—the key turns upside down, mind—and let me hear you whistle till you bring me back the key. Don't tell me nonsense about your lips being dry. You can whistle like a blackbird when ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... maid was in the garden Hanging out the clothes, When along came a blackbird, And ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... said the blackbird. "It really was the most extraordinary thing. I made that song last Spring, it came to me all of a sudden. There was the most beautiful she-blackbird that the world has ever seen. Her eyes were blacker than lakes are at night, her feathers were blacker than the night itself, and nothing was ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... fine woman of forty years old. Her hair was thick and dark, her eyes a wondrous big pair and so grey as the mist, and her voice to poor Jane's was like a blackbird against a guinea-fowl. Farmer, he dropped in the shop pretty often to pass the time of day and measure her up; and for her part being a man-loving sort of woman, who had lost a good husband, but didn't see no very stark cause why she shouldn't find another, ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... the whole bird world is ruled by the signs that the trees hang out.' And she asked me what they were, and I told her to notice next spring that as soon as the birch-leaves opened, the pheasant began to crow and the thrush to sing and the blackbird to whistle; and when the oak-leaves looked their reddest, and not a day before, the whole tribe of finches ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... towards the well known spot. The mellow voice of the thrush, and the clear pipe of the blackbird, diversified at intervals with the tender notes of the nightingale, formed the most agreable natural concert. The breast of Delia, framed for softness and melancholy, was filled with sensations responsive to the objects around her, and even the eternal clack of ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... first, jay and blackbird and thrush; They shriek at his coming and curse him, each one; With the clay of the vale on his pads and his brush, It's the Fallowfield fox and he's pretty near done; It's a couple of hours since a whip tally-ho'd ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... an opportunity offered for bringing in a well-prepared anecdote which he had about Cambaceres, and a hot blackbird and white feet, but unluckily a country gentleman would tell some history of a battle between poachers and gamekeepers, which fixed the attention of the company till the moment for ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... was Blackbird, a Sac girl, who had been pointed out to his critical eye the previous summer as a beauty. Owen admitted she was not bad-looking for a squaw. Her burnished hair, which had got her the name, was ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... something inside giving way under the strain, Mr. Vickers restrained himself. He breathed hard, and glancing out of window sought to regain his equilibrium by becoming interested in a blackbird outside. ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... The beneficence of a warm, golden finger that reached gently through the port-hole and rested on my eye. What had happened? Oh—yes. "Like a blackbird in the spring." Slowly I fought my way back to consciousness. Triplett was sitting in a corner still clutching the hammer. On the floor lay Whinney and William Henry Thomas, their twisted ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... nuthatch, warbler, flicker, vireo, wren, American robin, catbird, tanager, bobolink, blue jay, oriole, grosbeck or redbird, creeper, redstart, waxwing, woodpecker, humming bird, killdeer, swallow, blue bird, blackbird, meadow lark, bunting, starling, redwing, purple martin, brown thresher, American goldfinch, chewink or ground robin, pewee or phoebe bird, chickadee, fly catcher, knat catcher, mouse hawk, whippoorwill, snow bird, titmouse, gull, eagle, buzzard, or any wild bird other than a game bird. ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... deal," he said musingly, "if I thought I could ever come acrost such a housekeeper as you be, Mariana. But there! that's snarin' a white blackbird." ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Timbers he returned to his Indian wife and children, but remained the friend of the United States. In General Harrison's day he was United States Indian agent at Fort Wayne, but was killed in the massacre of Fort Dearborn, in 1812, by the faithless bands of Potawatomi under the chief Blackbird. ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... was in the pantry, eating bread and honey The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes; There came a little blackbird and ...
— Harry's Ladder to Learning - Horn-Book, Picture-Book, Nursery Songs, Nursery Tales, - Harry's Simple Stories, Country Walks • Anonymous
... great lord who had three sons. He fell very ill, sent for doctors of every kind, even bonesetters, but they, none of them, could find out what was the matter with him, or even give him any relief. At last there came a foreign doctor, who declared that the Golden Blackbird alone could cure ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... few moments she had Mary's long hair down, and was chattering like a blackbird, wreathing the pearls in and out, and saying a thousand pretty little nothings,—weaving grace and poetry upon the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... spread delicate traceries on wall and grass; the sweet, persistent whistle of a blackbird intensified the calm of evening. It was hard to associate any thought of violence and of devastation with the blessed sunset calm and the clean fragrance of this land of misty mountains and quiet pasture so innocently aloof from ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... and hand are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude a boat slipped toward her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... these are not birds of passage; they do not leave us at the first cold blast, to find a warmer climate; the least we can do is to recompense them by feeding them when the weather is too severe! Several know me already, and are very tame. There is a blackbird in particular, and a blue tomtit, that are ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Beneath Winsome's window a blackbird hopped down upon the grass and took a tentative dab or two at the first slug he came across; but it was really too early for breakfast for a good hour yet, so he flew up again into a bush and preened his feathers, which had been discomposed by the limited accommodation of the night. ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... builds, as a general rule, during the early part of the rains (June to August), laying usually three or four eggs of a bright greenish-blue colour. The nest itself recalls that of the Blackbird, but it is frequently very clumsily made. On the 21st June last a boy brought me a nest of this species containing eight eggs. Two, if not three, of this clutch are easily separable from the others, being ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... the end of his regulation time Harold stopped crying suddenly, like a clock that had struck its hour; and with a serene and cheerful countenance wriggled out of Medea's embrace, and ran for a stone to throw at an intrusive blackbird. ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... with angry scream and chatter at the approach of an enemy, darts the "ousel cock so black of hue, with orange-tawny bill." How dull a lawn would be without his pert movements when he comes down alternately with his russet wife. One blackbird with a broad white feather on each side of his tail haunted Elderfield for two years, but, alas! one spring day a spruce sable rival descended and captivated the faithless dame. They united, chased poor Mr. Whitetail over the high garden hedge, and ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... beauty. A bright ray of the setting sun streamed full upon that face, now reposing in the awful but hallowed calm which is sometimes diffused around the bed of death. The sacred stillness was only broken by the evening song of the blackbird and the distant lowing of the cattle—sounds which had often brought pleasure to that heart, now insensible to all human emotion. All nature shone forth in gaiety and splendour, but the eye and the ear were alike closed against all earthly objects. Yet who can tell the brightness of those visions ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... didn't say any more, but worked quietly and watched the shadow, feeling sure the faint song came from it. Presently she began to hum the tune she caught by snatches; and, before she knew it, she was singing away like a blackbird. Baby stopped crying, and ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... however, that only one gun should be taken out at a time, to diminish the danger of accidents. After that the boys took out their guns by turns when they went to work of a morning, and many a dead blackbird soon attested ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... tamarack blossoms. I lay in the shade, resting my burning feet and achiag bones, and I watched Nielsen as he whistled over the camp chores. Then I heard the sweet song of a meadow lark, and after that the melodious deep note of a swamp blackbird. These birds evidently were traveling north and had ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... particularly in long sloping valleys, that faced the morning sun, were covered with hazel and brushwood, where the unceasing and simple notes of the cuckoo were incessantly plied, mingled with the more mellow and varied notes of the thrush and blackbird. Sometimes the bright summer waterfall seemed, in the rays of the sun, like a column of light, and the springs that issued from the sides of the more distant and lofty mountains shone with a steady, dazzling brightness, on which the eye could scarcely ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... gentlemen were sitting side by side in a rather sloping car that had ascended the bank and buried its nose in a hedge of dog-rose and honeysuckle, from which two missel thrushes, a blackbird and a number of sparrows had made a ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... interpretation. The body of this bird is in colour a mixture of grey and brown, but its tail and wings are most beautifully marked with dark zig-zag bars, which make it very handsome. In size it is between the blackbird and the lark. Like the woodpecker, it has a very long tongue, which is covered with a glutinous matter, and which it inserts into the grass roots or tree bark, in search of ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... dear heart, I was the same at your age, and should be now, like enough. Fetch them all, as quick as you like. I am feared to leave Blackbird, or I'd help you down ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... pronounced against it; while after a little consideration, two or three made answer that it might very well be, that, while without doubt the bird had originally obtained this name from its blackness, yet 'blackbird' was now the name of a species, and a name so cleaving to it, as not to be forfeited, even when the blackness had quite disappeared. We do not question the right of the 'New Forest' to retain ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door. There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forward-step, and his springy side-wise series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American blackbird. But the sharp resemblances stop there. He is much bigger than the blackbird; and he lacks the blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and shapely beak; and of course his sober garb of gray and rusty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the nightingale? Must all the lesser voices cease? Lark, thrush and blackbird hold their peace? The woods wait dumb ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... feathered companions to feed him; but in a few weeks he grew so wild and manifested such a fierce desire for the outdoor world that I was glad to carry him out to the woods and give him his freedom. A young red-winged blackbird and a pair of meadowlarks developed ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... would return again to make the circuit of the garden in the company of Bainton, according to custom,—and as he stretched his four hairy paws out comfortably, and blinked his brown eyes at a portly blackbird prodding in the turf for a worm within a stone's throw of him, he was evidently considering whether it would be worth his while, as an epicurean animal, to escort these two men on their usual round on such a warm pleasant morning. For it was a dog's real lazy day,—a day when merely to lie on the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... determined to have his say. He plumed his feathers and looked severe, As the birds flew in from far and near. A Mocking Bird sat on a limb near by, With a desperate look in his round, dark eye; He was the culprit—a thief he had been, The Thrush and the Blackbird had "run him in." He had stolen the nest of the little brown Wren From the tangled depth of a shady glen. The Hawk was the Judge, and sat in state, Ready to seal the prisoner's fate. "A thief is worse," said the Bobolink, "Than anything else on earth, I think." But—"Order in Court"—rang close ...
— Nestlings - A Collection of Poems • Ella Fraser Weller
... We have no more reason to believe in such a relation than we have to believe that the similar bones in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, and fin of a porpoise, are related to similar conditions of life. No one supposes that the stripes on the whelp of a lion, or the spots on the young blackbird, are of any use ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... bound for Nassau; its blackbird crew spoke English and they willingly helped the strangers overside, laughing and shouting in a child-like display of excitement. How firm, how grateful was the feel of that stout deck! How safe the schooner's measured roll! ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... to do. She could quite well finish her packing in the morning. She sat down at the desk and set to work to arrange her papers. It was a warm spring evening, and the window was open. A crowd of noisy sparrows seemed to be delighted about something. From somewhere, unseen, a blackbird was singing. She read over her report for Mrs. Denton. The blackbird seemed never to have heard of war. He sang as if the whole world were a garden of languor and love. Joan looked at her watch. The first gong would ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... bushes with young oaks starting through them, still bare of leaves, ferns beginning to mark green lanes into the heart of the woods, and certain dark wet places where the insects had already begun to hum. But when the wood opened out the birds were talking to one another, blackbird to blackbird, thrush to thrush, robin to robin, kin understanding kin, and every bird uttering vain jargon to them that did not wear the same beak and feathers, just like ourselves, Joseph said to himself and he stood stark before a hollow into which he remembered having once been forbidden ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... primroses, and cowslips; all the trees bursting into leaves, and the hedges already clothed with their vernal livery; the mountains covered with flocks of sheep and tender bleating wanton lambkins playing, frisking, and skipping from side to side; the groves resound with the notes of blackbird, thrush, and linnet; and all night long sweet Philomel pours forth her ravishingly delightful song. Then, for variety, we go down to the nymph of Bristol spring, where the company is assembled before ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... mountain tops every moment stronger. The dewy scents of the May morning were filling the air with their nameless and numberless tokens of rich nature's bounty. The voice of a cataract, close at hand, made merry down the rocks along with the song of the blackbird, woodpecker and titmouse. And still, as Eleanor stood there and looked and listened, the rush and the stir of sweet life grew more and more; the spring breeze wakened up and floated past her face bringing the breath of the flowers fresher and nearer; and the hill tops ever kindled into more and ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... Love, and orchards, shrubberies, walls Where the sun untroubled by north wind falls, And single trees where the thrush sings well His proverbs untranslatable, I would give them all to my son If he would let me any one For a song, a blackbird's song, at dawn. He should have no more, till on my lawn Never a one was left, because I Had shot them to put them into a pie,— His Essex blackbirds, every one, And I ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... hospitality, was hastily putting them back, when the man, looking up, caught sight of a bundle of oaten pipes among the miscellaneous wares. He plucked one to him, and in a moment the air was full of tender liquid notes—a thrush's roundelay. Then a blackbird called and his mate answered; a cuckoo cried the spring-song; a linnet mourned with lifting cadence; a nightingale poured forth her ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... whose ardour was already melting into the tenderness of evening, shone upon a broad valley, where the grass stood high in rich meadows separated from other meadows and green cornfields by hedges, from the midst of which rose many a tall tree. The blackbird's low, flute-like note sounded above the shrilling ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... here, knowing yourselves to be going to Lawrence, and I told her stay as long as she had a mind. Wisha, she 'd an old apron on her in five minutes' time, an' took hold wit' the wash, and wint singing like a blackbird out in the yard at the line. 'Sit down, Aunty!' says she; 'you 're not so light-stepping as me, an' I 'll tell you all the news from home; an' I 'll get the dinner, too, when I 've done this,' says she. Wisha, ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... will know about the hospital and be glad to see me coming," thought Nelly. And indeed it seemed so, for just then a blackbird, sitting on the garden wall, burst out with a song full of musical joy, Nelly's kitten came running after to stare at the wagon and rub her soft side against it, a bright-eyed toad looked out from his ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... of Crow Blackbird this fine but unpopular bird is known, unpopular among the farmers for his depredations in their cornfields, though the good he does in ridding the soil, even at the harvest season, of noxious insects and grubs should be set ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... narrow seats—and we That through the open window saw the ridge Of Fergus, and the peak Of utmost Cior Mohr—nor held it wrong, When vext with platitude and stirless air, To watch the mist-wreaths clothe the rock-scarps bare And in the pauses hear the blackbird's song. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... found herself and of the use of such rooms. It is interesting to note also in the first case that in her wildest delirium during an acute attack she lived through episodes of her past life. One example may be given. In the course of her delirium she thought that a "blackbird" had flown to her, touched her left wrist and taken away all her vitality. This depended on an experience of her going to Germany when a girl and meeting a young German officer whom she did not like. A few years later she went to Germany and met the officer again. Without going ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... warbling wild, Shall to the skies aspire; The gowdspink, Music's gayest child, Shall sweetly join the choir; The blackbird strong, the lintwhite clear, The mavis mild and mellow; The robin pensive Autumn cheer, In ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... ostriches, and a bird larger than our blackbird[53]; also storks, which latter are birds of passage, and arrive in the spring and disappear at the approach of winter; ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... have to come to it. She tried once more. It was a long time before she could call the letters and spell out words, and it was many months before she could read at all without spelling. It was hard work for Nan and harder for her teacher. Before she had half looked at a word she would hear a blackbird or see a hawk after a chicken, or she thought "sure, Miss Lizzy called." I tried to have patience and in the end I conquered. Nan was "mighty proud" when she read the last page ...
— American Missionary, August, 1888, (Vol. XLII, No. 8) • Various
... would linger there, listening to the pleading passion of the blackbird's note, the thrush's call to joy and hope. He loved her gentle ways. From the bold challenges, the sly glances of invitation flashed upon him in the street or from some neighbouring table in the cheap luncheon room he had always shrunk confused and awkward. Her shyness gave ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... Watch Rosanella Sylvain and Jocosa Fairy Gifts Prince Narcissus and the Princess Potentilla Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine The Three Little Pigs Heart of Ice The Enchanted Ring The Snuff-box The Golden Blackbird The Little Soldier The Magic Swan The Dirty Shepherdess The Enchanted Snake The Biter Bit King Kojata Prince Fickle and Fair Helena Puddocky The Story of Hok Lee and the Dwarfs The Story of the Three Bears Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida Little One-eye, Little ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... Frivolity and Show. It is a day of Spring; I want to see my roses blow, And hear the blackbird sing. I wish to prune my apple-trees, And nail my peaches straight; Keep to the causeway, if you please— I've ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... stately figure was not inferior in height to the old one's, but his shoulders were narrower, his features less broad and full, and his hair and beard had the glossy raven hue of the blackbird's plumage. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... when twilight's falling softly On the little green orchard; When the gray dew distils And every flower cup fills; When the last blackbird says, "What—what!" and goes her way—ssh! I have heard voices calling softly In ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... premonition are the surprises of youth. This straight young woman turned, for a moment her grey eyes rested on the False Prophet and me, then a smile travelled from her red mouth out through the land of dimples, and she laughed like a blackbird. ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... bit of river awakened her interest; Blackbird Island was clearly described: Buffalo Island harked back many years into tradition; Dogtooth Island was a matter of river shape; but Saladin, Tow Head and Orient Field stirred her imagination, for they might reveal the scene of steamboat disasters ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
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