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More "Rook" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... between the old, and giving a tone to the rest as you look down into the bunches. Some blades are nearly grey, some the palest green, and among them others, torn from the roots perhaps by rooks searching for grubs, are quite white. The very track of a rook through the grass leaves a different shade each side, as the blades are ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart me,—it was queer with what projectile silence that jumped upon me out of nothingness, and I yelled helplessly, "Get out of the way!" The bird doubled itself up like a partly inverted V, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... of many people of the lower sort that crowded the terrace before the garden. Now the rain fell, and all was desolation. A yeoman in brown fustian ran bending his head before the tempestuous rain. A rook, blown impotently backwards, essayed slowly to cross towards the western trees. Her eyes followed him until a great gust blew him in a wider curve, backwards and up, and when again he steadied himself he was no ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... I'd shoot a fly off yer nose; an' wid that I looked round for a mark, an' I seen in a three foreninst me a lump o' a crow sittin' annoyin' me. 'Will ye quit yer dhrimandhru?' says I, to the botherin' ould rook. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... us think. Far off on the clear gray sky appears a wavering speck which rises and falls and sways from side to side in an extraordinary way. Nearer and nearer the speck comes, until at last we find ourselves standing under a rook which flies with great difficulty. The poor rascal looks most disreputable, for his tail has evidently been shot away, and he is wounded. He drops on to a perch, but not before he has run the gauntlet of several lines of sharp eyes. The ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... and then the vision of no short-sighted man could have got over the interval in the wall made by the narrow casement, which, after all, gave no other prospect than a Cumberland sky, with an occasional rook in it. But my father, I think I have said before, did not much care for scenery, and he looked round with great satisfaction upon the retreat ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as far away as ever, and, getting out of bed, he drew the curtains, seeking the landscape, still hidden in the mist, only a few tree-tops showing over the grey vapour—the valley filled with it—and over the hidden hill one streak of crimson. A rook cawed and flew away into the mist, leaving Owen to wonder what the bird's errand might be; and this rook was followed by others, and seeing nothing distinctly, and knowing nothing of himself or of this woman whom he had loved so long, he returned to his bed frightened, counting ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... peculiar utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the Songster Family,—the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... birds were hopping by the sides of the road; it was the magpie, the bird of ancient fable. Flocks of what I at first took for the crow of our country were stalking in the fields, or sailing in the air over the old elms; it was the rook, the bird made as classical by Addison as his cousin the raven by the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... like this is sheer libel," he answered presently. "Larssen could rook you for goodness knows what damages ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... his eyes a little. "What! the millionaire?... Good biz! We'll rook him at poker and bridge and shooting, and a few other things. It isn't right for him to have all that money. It would even things up a little if we could transfer some of ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... older "roc." The word is Persian, with many meanings, e.g. a cheek (Lalla "Rookh"); a "rook" (hero) at chess; a rhinoceros, etc. The fable world-wide of the wundervogel is, as usual, founded upon fact: man remembers and combines but does not create. The Egyptian Bennu (Ti-bennuphoenix) may have been a reminiscence of gigantic pterodactyls and other winged monsters. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... perfect horror of getting to the end of it. At a distance, when our smoke-sail yard was manned; we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose in the midst of us. "Doey, get beyond me, zur; doey, Mr Rattlin," he would say. "Ah! zur, I'd climb with any bragger in this ship for a rook's nest, where I ha' got a safe bough to stand upon; but to dance upon this here see-sawing line, and to call it a horse, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... whereas the carrion crow, for reasons of its own, has a fondness for living in trios. This menage a trois may have subtle advantages and seems to be a step in the direction of the truly social habits of the rook; it enables them to fight with more success against their enemies, the hawks, and fosters, likewise, a certain lightheartedness which the sententious raven lacks. No one who has watched the aerial antics of a triplet of carrion crows can deny them a ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... spirit of fun and laughter. He had been engaged, as we have noted, to furnish a text for some comic drawings, thus reversing the usual order of illustration. The pictures were intended to poke fun at a club of sportsmen; and Dickens, who knew nothing of sport, bravely set out with Mr. Winkle on his rook-shooting. Then, while the story was appearing in monthly numbers, the illustrator committed suicide; Dickens was left with Mr. Pickwick on his hands, and that innocent old gentleman promptly ran away with the author. Not being in the least adventurous, Mr. Pickwick ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... crept down again, and went out of the house. She had a place of refuge in these cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been. This place was Rook's Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery's part when that young woman was particularly ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... shouldst bring forth thy priests, Al Kahlminar, then would I confront them and thee with the two elephants which my brother sent me lately from Geestan, on each of which I can place a rook with a slave cunning with the javelin, before which thy priests will flee; for the animals see no difference between priests and other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to learn the ebb of time From yon dull steeple's drowsy chime, Or mark it as the sunbeams crawl, Inch after inch, along the wall. The lark was wont my matins ring, The sable rook my vespers sing: These towers, although a king's they be, Have not a hall of joy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Horse Show, which she drove to with Mrs. Mannering in a hired fly. I don't call it very polite to the hostess, do you? This afternoon she amused herself from her bedroom window by shooting at rabbits just beyond the wire fence of the lawn with a rook rifle; she did not hit any rabbits, but she got a gardener in the leg, and the man was very angry, and bled a great deal, and had to be taken away, and I think it was very careless of her, ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... spears—wheeled and manoeuvred. By the Nile all the tops of the palm-trees were crowded with daring riflemen, whose positions were indicated by the smoke-puffs of their rifles, or when some tiny black figure fell, like a shot rook, to the ground. In the foreground the gunboats, panting and puffing up the river, were surrounded on all sides by spouts and spurts of water, thrown up by the shells and bullets. Again the flotilla drew near the narrow channel; again the watching army held their breath; and ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... rooks held quite a parliament to vindicate the innocence of their order; and at last passed a vote of censure upon the sparrow for his false accusation; agreed to send him to Coventry; and, as one old rook said, it would have been much more to his credit to have had his shirt-front washed, for it was dreadfully dirty, than to have gone making the rooks out blacker than they really were. Then someone said it was the magpie; ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... speaking by rote, or talking politics. How glad I used to be to get on horseback again! But to see these—why, it is like the shepherd's glimpse at the pixies!—as one reads a new book, or watches what one only half understands—a rook's parliament, or a gathering of ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their husbands' fate, And orphans for their parents' timeless death,— Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born. The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, And chatt'ring pies in dismal discord sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope, An indigested and deformed lump, Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... table with a small rook-rifle in her hands. The breech was open. She looked down the barrel, holding up the weapon so that the light might shine ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... lake without disporting itself into many little cataracts; and saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were grey, forget all the gratifications and all the guilt of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... or political principle by the expenditure of physical force. Anyone at all conversant with philosophical thought, if I may adopt a simile used by Mr. H. G. Wells, "would as soon think of trying to kill the square root of 2 with a rook rifle." Physical violence can only solve purely physical problems. But as man no longer exists, if he ever did exist, in the completely unsocial "state of nature,"[86] the relations of one individual with another are no longer ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... words went in at one ear and out at the other, and were all cast upon the sea; and the poor King, seeing that his son was as immovable as a rook upon a belfry, gave him a handful of dollars and two or three servants; and bidding him farewell, he felt as if his soul was torn out of his body. Then weeping bitterly, he went to a balcony, and followed his son with his eyes until he ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... building rook'll caw from the windy tall elm-tree, And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea, And the swallow'll come back again with summer o'er the wave. But I shall lie alone, mother, within the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... shining points which, upon this side, sink In dark, yet still are there; this ragged crane Spreading his wings at seeing us with vain Terror, forsooth; the trees, a pulpy stock Of toadstools huddled round them; and the flock— Black wings after black wings—of ancient rook By rook; has not the whole scene got a look As though we were the first whose breath should fan In two this spider's web, to give a span Of life more to three flies? See, there's a stone Seems made for us to sit on. Have men gone By here, and passed? or rested ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... strange!" T'an Ch'un exclaimed. "Instead of bracing up your energies now to rook some money out of our venerable senior, you turn ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... A rook, taking a last look at the world before retiring to rest, watching from his leafless bough, saw a mortal spirit defying the universe, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... grave, but gentle look— His silence sweet with sounds With which the simple-hearted Spring abounds: Lowing of cattle from the abbey grounds, Chirping of insect, and the building rook, Mingled like murmurs of a dreaming shell; Quaint tracery of bird and branch and brook Flitting across the pages of his book, Until the very words a freshness took— Deep in his cell, Sate the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... door, lived Colonel Warren, my host, and under his roof, the morning after my arrival, I first definitely felt that I had left the West behind me, when I found that a noise by which I had been just awakened, and which sounded like the cawing of a rook, was that of the muezzin borne from a neighboring minaret and requesting me to ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... cold and rook delighting Heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild, that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... "A rook, I dare say! And what business had you to think, coming trespassing here on my ground, and breaking the hedges! I'd have you up for that, if for nothing ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Green-peas' is informed, that when A plays his rook to B's second Knight's square, and B, moving two squares with his Queen's pawn, gives check to his adversary's Queen, there is no reason why B's Queen should not take A's pawn, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... appearances which we are accustomed to connect with the communication of an idea from one mind to another, can we deny that they have a language of their own, though it is one which in most cases we can neither speak nor understand? How can we say that a sentinel rook, when it sees a man with a gun and warns the other rooks by a concerted note which they all show that they understand by immediately taking flight, should not be credited both with reason and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... to assume his position in the county. Thus Leonora had accepted Maisie Maidan almost with resignation—almost with a sigh of relief. She really liked the poor child—she had to like somebody. And, at any rate, she felt she could trust Maisie—she could trust her not to rook Edward for several thousands a week, for Maisie had refused to accept so much as a trinket ring from him. It is true that Edward gurgled and raved about the girl in a way that she had never yet experienced. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... the nave was not completed, the north-west chapel was opened for daily morning service, at six in the summer, and seven in the winter. Queen Anne attended in state for the victories of Marlborough on land, and of Ormond and Rook at sea (Nov. 12, 1702). Two years later came Blenheim; and she went again in her state coach drawn by eight bays. From the west door to the choir, under the unfinished vaulting and dome, the way was lined by a detachment of Foot Guards; and as the long ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... The rook croaked homeward heavily, The west was clear and warm, The smoke of evening food and ease Rose like a blue tree in the trees When he ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... hoarse, crowing voice not at all unpleasant. If you listen to English children playing in the street you will often hear this croaking sort of voice, like the voice of a young rook. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... eyes of the little Jan first came to be of tender interest with Mrs. Lake, she fully hoped, and constantly prophesied, that he would be "as black as a rook;" a style of complexion to which she gave a distinct preference, though the miller was fair by nature as well as white by ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... one of those inexcusable oversights which will sometimes afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms of one of her pawns. It was her first advantage. She ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Somerset—rest his soul—would have had us wedded. On the love day, when all walked together to St. Paul's, and the King hoped all was peace, we spoke our vows to one another in the garden of Westminster. She gave me this rook, I gave her the jewel of my cap; I read her true love in her eyes, like our limpid northern brooks. Oh! she was fair, fairer than yonder star in the sunset, but her father, the Lord Audley, was ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ROOK PIE. Skin and draw some young rooks, cut out the backbones, and season with pepper and salt. Lay them in a dish with a little water, strew some bits of butter over them, cover the dish with a thick ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... occurrence of the Jay in the Island, and adds that the local name for the Mistletoe Thrush is "Geai." Mr. Gallienne, in a note to Professor Ansted's list, confirms the scarcity of the Jay, as he says the Rook and the Jay are rarely seen here, although they are indigenous to Jersey. The local name "Geai" may perhaps have misled him as to the occasional appearance of the Jay. I have never seen a ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... transcribe his sentiments on his former literary friends in Scotland—he is writing to Mallet: "Far from defending these two lines, I damn them to the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, prepared of old for Mitchell, Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Wherever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably the perverse criticisms ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... bumping his head against a wall like a hooded rook as he was. So giddy had he become at the sight of this creature, even more enticing than a siren rising from the water. He noticed the animals carved over the door and returned to the house of the archbishop with his head full of diabolical ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... didn't mean it," cried Hal, turning in the terrible grip; "I thought it was only a rook!" ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Castin—speedily arrive in the Colony.' That throws light upon the mystery, Cadet! A woman was to have an interview with Caroline at midnight! Good God, Cadet! not two hours before we arrived! And we deferred starting in order that we might rook the Signeur de Port Neuf! Too late! too late! Oh cursed word that ever seals our fate when we propose a good deed!" and Bigot felt himself a man ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Crow may be considered the representative, in America, of the European Rook, which he resembles in many of his habits, performing similar services, and being guilty of the same mischievous deeds. It is remarkable that in Europe, where land is more valuable than in this country, and where agriculture is carried on with an amount ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... nerve. Yes, I mean that——" for Winter's prominent eyes showed surprise at the statement. "He's a strange mixture, is Mr. Hilton. He's a fair nailer with a revolver. I've seen him hit a penny three times straight off at twelve paces, and, when in the mind, he would bowl over running rabbits with a rook rifle. Yet he never joined the shooting parties in October. Said it made him ill to see graceful birds shattered by clumsy folk. All the same, he would ill-treat a horse ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... generous space Of undulant plain; the rook and crow Hush; 'tis as if a silent grace, By Nature murmured, calmed the face Of Heaven above and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... paired, the male bird is usually the most eager, but after marriage the female often becomes the wooer. Of this I have seen some marked instances." Selous mentions especially the plover, kestrel hawk, and rook. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... regarded him and ventured to go on: "I was witness for the police and Mr. Gillett, and he—Steele," with a curse, "had me on the stand. He knows every rook and welsher and every swell magsman, and all their haunts and habits. And he knows me—blame—" he made use of another expression more forcible—"if he don't know me as well as if he'd once been a pal. And now," in an injured tone, "Mr. Gillett calls me hard names for ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... to your state tricks!" exclaimed Bucklaw—"your cold calculating manoeuvres, which old gentlemen in wrought nightcaps and furred gowns execute like so many games at chess, and displace a treasurer or lord commissioner as they would take a rook or a pawn. Tennis for my sport, and battle for my earnest! And you, Master, so dep and considerate as you would seem, you have that within you makes the blood boil faster than suits your present humour of moralising on political truths. You are one of those wise men who see everything with ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... increasing, made breathing so difficult that she turned a few paces aside, and sat down upon a rough block of stone, long since quarried and left unused. Just before her was a small patch of marshy ground, long grass growing about a little pool. A rook had alighted on the margin, and was pecking about. Presently it rose on its heavy wings; she watched it flap athwart the dun sky. Then her eye fell on a little yellow flower near her feet, a flower she ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... usually builds; but such is its attachment to locality that since the incident alluded to in the following Poem took place the Rooks have, many of them, built in fir trees at a little distance from their former habitation. The habits of the Rook are well worthy the attention of all who delight in the study of ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... and Jerkin, The Falcon and Tassel-gentle, The Laner and Laneret, The Bockerel and Bockeret, The Saker and Sacaret, The Merlin and Jack Merlin, The Hobby and Jack: There is the Stelletto of Spain, The Blood-red Rook from Turkey, The Waskite from Virginia: And there is of short-winged Hawks, The Eagle and Iron The Goshawk and Tarcel, The Sparhawk and Musket, The French Pye ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... fruitfulness of wood and wold, Of flowery upland, and of orchard-lawn, Lit by the lingering evening's softened gold, Or flushed with rose-hued radiance of the dawn; Bird-music beautiful; the robin's trill, Or the rook's drowsy clangour; flats that run From sky to sky, dusk woods that drape the hill, Still lakes that draw the sun; All, all are mirror'd in his verse, and there Familiar beauties shine most ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... Bielovyezha forests. The sable has quite disappeared, being found only on the Urals; the beaver is found at a few places in Minsk, and the otter is very rare. On the other hand, the hare and also the grey partridge, the hedgehog, the quail, the lark, the rook, and the stork find their way into the coniferous region as the forests are cleared. The avifauna is very rich; it includes all the forest and garden birds which are known in western Europe, as well ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... irony and essential force being much dimmed by obscure expression, and even slightly staggering continuity of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally; but the Rook does not teach pamphleteering literally. And the 'of old' is redundant, for rhyme's sake, since Rooks hold parliaments now as much as ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... a melancholy temper. You ought to live out of doors, dig potatoes, make hay, shoot, hunt, tumble into ditches, and come home muddy and hungry for dinner. It would be much better for you than moping in your rook tower, ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... are called Pawns. At the beginning of the game the queen always stands upon a square of her own colour. The board is so set that each player has a white square at the right hand end of the row nearest to him. The rook, knight and bishop on the right of the king are known as King's rook, King's knight, and King's bishop; the other three as Queen's rook, Queen's knight, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Cock then blew his horn, To let the neighbors know, This was Robin's wedding-day, And they might see the show. And first came parson Rook, With his spectacles and band, And one of Mother Hubbard's books He held within ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... the rook, and the vast increase of these birds of late years in certain parts of Essex, has been productive of great mischief, especially in the vicinity of Writtle and of Waltham. Since February last, notwithstanding a vigilant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... again to her distraught imagination, amid the pitiful ejaculations of the entire company, with the exception of one mundane, young man who, suddenly assailed by the wild fancy that he wasn't drinking, crept furtively to the Moorish rook, and ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the river, in the hope that it might serve as a lifebelt. The second item, upon which Speug prided himself very much, was a climbing match, and for this he had selected a tree which seemed to be designed for the purpose, since it had a rook's nest on its highest branch, and no branches at all for the first twenty feet. The conditions were, that every boy above twelve should have his chance, and the boy who climbed to the top, put his hand into the rook's nest, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... horn, To let the neighbors know, This was Robin's wedding-day, And they might see the show. And first came Parson Rook, With his spectacles and band, And one of Mother Hubbard's books He held within ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... he is as stupid as a rook, that crittur, it's no use to tell him a story, and now I think of it, I will go and smoke them ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... have a wiser look; Mayhap they whispered to the brook: "The world by him shall yet be shook, It is in nature's plan; Though now he fleets like any rook ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... far-extending wilds of Guiana the traveller will be astonished at the immense quantity of ants which he perceives on the ground and in the trees. They have nests in the branches four or five times as large as that of the rook; and they have a covered way from them to the ground. In this covered way thousands are perpetually passing and repassing; and if you destroy part of it, they turn to and ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... Thrush, * blackbird, * lark, * yellowhammer, * robin, *wren, * golden-crested wren, * goldfinch, * chaffinch, * *greenfinch, pied wagtail, sparrow, * dunnock (hedge, accentor), missel thrush, starling, rook, jackdaw, *blackcap, * garden warbler, * willow warbler, * chiffchaff, * wood warbler, tree-creeper, * reed bunting, * sedge warbler, coot, water hen, little grebe (dabchick), tufted duck, wood pigeon, stock dove, * turtle dove, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... for a rich man to go to heaven, which may be true, but such judgments should be left to God, and, carrying it still further, I said it was as hard for a rich man to go to heaven as for cow to calve in a rook's nest. ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... earth should you ever be out of spirits? Is your last box of Doucet dresses a failure, or did Judy rook you out of everything ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of speed over the very rough rails was excessive; it was, however, consolatory to feel that any little unpleasantness which might occur through the fact of the car leaving the track would be attended with some sense of alleviation. The rook is said to have thought he was paying dear for good company when he was put into the pigeon pie, but it by no means follows that a leap from an embankment, or an upset into a river, would be as disastrous as is usually supposed, if taken in the society ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... A white rook has been observed at Boston Road, Brentford, and a local ornithologist writes to say that the bird is probably an accidental ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... the other day the true story of a little East Side tailor who could not earn enough to support himself and his wife. He became half-crazed from lack of food and together they resolved to commit suicide. Somehow he secured a small 22-caliber rook rifle and a couple of cartridges. The wife knelt down on the bed in her nightgown, with her face to the wall, and repeated a prayer while he shot her in the back. When he saw her sink to the floor dead he became so unnerved that, instead of turning the rifle on himself, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... contemplate the print of her foot after she had passed; he didn't know why, for there was nothing in it, after all. No, Joe, nothing in it—it was in you; that makes all the difference. And the voice whispered to him of sunny days in the bright fields, when he held the plough, and the sly old rook would come bobbing and pecking behind him; and the little field-mouse would flit away from its turned up nest, frightened to death, as if it were smitten with an earthquake; and the skylark would dart ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... the snow had fallen more thickly. The trees and hedges were black and hard against the white horizon that was tightly stretched like the paper of a Japanese screen. The smell of burning wood was in the air, and once and again a rook slowly swung its wheel, cutting the air as it flew. The cold was so pleasantly sharp that it was the best possible thing for Uncle Mathew, who was accustomed to an atmosphere of hissing gas, unwashen glasses, and ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... a rook by wearing a pied feather, The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff, A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot On his French garters, should affect a humour! O, it is ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... the ebb of time, From yon dull steeple's drowsy chime, Or mark it as the sunbeams crawl, 675 Inch after inch, along the wall. The lark was wont my matins ring, The sable rook my vespers sing; These towers, although a king's they be, Have not a hall of joy for ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... devoted to himself; but if he were an eagerly ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money enough, did not exert himself greatly to acquire reputation ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Mortimer, 'high up an awful staircase commanding a burial-ground, and I have a whole clerk to myself, and he has nothing to do but look at the burial-ground, and what he will turn out when arrived at maturity, I cannot conceive. Whether, in that shabby rook's nest, he is always plotting wisdom, or plotting murder; whether he will grow up, after so much solitary brooding, to enlighten his fellow-creatures, or to poison them; is the only speck of interest that presents itself to my professional view. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... their hostility, Sir James spared no pains to win their good will. He gave the Terror a rook-rifle and Erebus boxes of chocolate. If he chanced on them when motoring in the afternoon he would carry them off, bicycles and all, in his car and regale them with sumptuous teas at the Grange; and at Colet House he entertained them with stories of the African ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... knot-hole of the pollard elm—common eggs, but within each a speck that is not to be found in the cut diamond of two hundred carats—the dot of protoplasm, the atom of life. There was one row of pollards where they always began laying first. With a big stick in his beak the rook is blown aside like a loose feather in the wind; he knows his building-time from the fathers of his house—hereditary knowledge handed down in settled course: but the stray things of the hedge, how do they know? The great blackbird has planted his nest by the ash-stole, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... other questions controversy still rages. These are: (a) how Greek utilized the four sibilants (Shin, Samech, Zain and Zade), which it rook over from the Phoenician; (b) what was the history of development in the symbols for f, ch, ps, o (the history of x belongs to both heads); (c) the history of the symbol for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... insomuch that the natives of the town of Bray are as well known and distinguished as the negroes are from white men. And this unhappy jest has been carried so far that our people have often sallied out in arms against their scoffers, and given them battle: neither king nor rook, nor fear nor shame, being able to restrain them. Tomorrow, I believe, or next day, those of our town will take the field against the people of another village about two leagues from us, being one of those which persecute us most: and I have brought the lances and halberds which you saw, that ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... you will. It's a fact that you've been grumbling and growling ever since we left Rangoon, and have made difficulties innumerable where you needn't have done so, and now, because you think the affair is going to turn out badly, you round upon me as if it were all a put-up job on my part, to rook you of your money. It's not the thing, Hayle, and I don't mind ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... England, with Rosa! To see it as though it was all fresh! The fancy took strong hold of me. I saw myself going through St. Paul's, the Tower, Monument and Westminster Abbey, as an alien. I saw the hungry landlady in the Bloomsbury boarding-house trying to rook me. 'Bloomsburys' have a very bad name in Italy among educated people. I read an article in the Stampa—very humorous ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... O'Brien was without doubt the man who fired at you, looking to the type of gentleman he is, and the fact that you ran into him immediately afterwards, and especially the fact that he actually does possess an old rook rifle. He thinks he may have done it out of sheer Irish deviltry, you offering so convenient a target, just as they pot landlords in his own happy country. A man can hardly have drunk as heavily as he must have done without upsetting his brain a bit, ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... day before that I had been looking on a map of the Rhine, and remarked to myself that this small island, little more than a mere rook in the stream, was so situated as to command the bridge between Eslar and the German bank, and I could not help wondering that the Austrians had never taken the precaution to strengthen it, or at least place a gun there, to enfilade the bridge. Now, to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... make matters interesting. Of course there ought to be jungle-cats and birds of prey and other agencies of sudden death to add to the illusion of liberty, but the bird's own imagination is capable of inventing those—look how a domestic fowl will squawk an alarm note if a rook or wood pigeon passes over its run ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... the barber, "I give my word here and before God that I will not repeat what your worship says, to King, Rook or earthly man—an oath I learned from the ballad of the curate, who, in the prelude, told the king of the thief who had robbed him of the hundred gold crowns ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Fadyane,[63] Far northward in a nook, By he the Correnoch had done shout,[64] Ersch-men[65] so gather'd him about In hell great room they took: These termagants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersch began to clatter, And roup[66] like raven and rook. The devil so deaved[67] was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smored[68] them ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... which overshadows the shore and which marks the place where the Norsemen fled before the face of Even the Great. On this oak, whose leaves shine in the moon, the birds gather each night, the birds of the sea and the land, both of white and black feather. Among them is an old grey rook and a young crow. The birds sing such a beautiful song that the great sea keeps silence to hear it. All of them sing except the rook and the crow. Now the crow says: "Sing, little birds, sing; sing, little birds of the land, for when you die you will at least end ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... consciousness of life,—to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;—and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... channel in less than an hour, we found the horses tethered among the bushes. House there was none, which must be inconvenient when the weather is too tempestuous for crossing the strait from Parao. We took shelter from the heat under a rook, making studies of a group of picturesque shepherds, and amusing ourselves with some luscious grapes,—baskets of which were waiting for the return of the passage-boat to La Madelena,—while a pack-horse was ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... were soon treading the walls that had once sustained the cannon and the sentinel, but were now covered with weeds and wild flowers. The drum and fife had once been heard within these walls—the only music now is the cawing of the rook and daw. We paid a hasty visit to the various apartments, remaining longest in those of most interest. The room in which Martin the Regicide was imprisoned nearly twenty years, was pointed out to us. The Castle of Chepstow is still a magnificent pile, towering upon the brink of a stupendous cliff, ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... how full and plain the Word of God is, against this sin, and them that use it. And therefore Mr. Badman, for that he used by these things thus to rook and cheat his neighbours, is rightly rejected from having his Name in, and among the catalogue ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... Husbands, Orphans, for their Parents timeles death, Shall rue the houre that euer thou was't borne. The Owle shriek'd at thy birth, an euill signe, The Night-Crow cry'de, aboding lucklesse time, Dogs howl'd, and hiddeous Tempest shook down Trees: The Rauen rook'd her on the Chimnies top, And chatt'ring Pies in dismall Discords sung: Thy Mother felt more then a Mothers paine, And yet brought forth lesse then a Mothers hope, To wit, an indigested and deformed lumpe, Not like the fruit of such a goodly Tree. Teeth had'st thou in thy head, when ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... landed on an island (Findon) sprinkled with trees, and with a park-like bank sloping to the water. This was refreshing to the eye after having seen nothing but bare rook for many days. The meeting was at our friend's house who owned the pretty little farm. It was sweet and refreshing; and afterwards a number of these people accompanied us to the boat, and did not quit their standing till we were out of sight. My heart yearned towards ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... contribution is made here, unless one excepts the academically clever portraits by Troccoli, a landscape by Vonnoh, and a sumptuous bed of rhododendrons by Edward F. Rook. Two large "Grand Caons" again demonstrate the utter futility of trying to paint such motives, which, in their success, depend entirely upon a feeling of scale that is almost impossible to attain on a ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... electric bells upon the wall behind. "The more vulnerable spots are connected at night with these bells," he said triumphantly. "Any attempt to scale the barbed wire or to force either gate would set two or more of these ringing. A stray cow raised one false alarm," he added, "and a careless rook threw us into a perfect ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... occupying, provided it is not already taken by a piece belonging to his opponent, but he can go no farther. The queen can be moved in any direction up, down, backwards, forwards, as long as there is no piece to block her. The same can be done with the rook or castle, except that it cannot be moved diagonally—The bishop can only be moved diagonally, in a backward or forward direction. The move of the knight is a combination of the rook's shortest move, followed by the bishop's shortest move. It ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... precocious rook, who Haunts the high hall garden calling "Maud;" Mine's no "blithe newcomer" like the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... bottom left-hand corner to the top right-hand corner, also the five cells in the diagonal next above it and the cell in the bottom right-hand corner. The answer for six couples will be the same as the number of ways in which you can place six rooks (not using the cancelled cells) so that no rook shall ever attack another rook. It will be found that the six rooks may be placed in eighty different ways, which ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the long running, and lay on the rook floor with my head on my arms, and I felt as a hound feels after a long chase, till the caveman answered Dan. At the first I thought his tongue had been malformed as he stood in the light, for a growling and grumbling ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... William and Robert of Pickering, Adam de Bruce and Mathilda his wife." The two beautifully carved figures of a knight and his lady that lie in the Bruce Chapel are not Bruces for the surcoat of the man is adorned with the arms of the Rockcliffes—an heraldic chess-rook and three lions' heads. Both the knight and his lady wear the collar of SS, the origin of which is still wrapped in obscurity. Traces of gilding are visible in several places on the wings of the angels that support the heads of both ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... of the house; but being noisy, and not altogether cleanly in their habits, the ladies of the family grew weary of them and wished to remove them. Accordingly, the colony was driven away, and made their present settlement in a grove behind the house. Ever since that time not a rook has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put together. Thus, either the memory of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... my bully rook: that Truscott would catch us before we got to Laramie—unless we went ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... sky, The tops of the high hills, Above the last man's house, His hedges, and his cows, Where, if I will, I look Down even on sheep and rook, And of all things that move See buzzards only above:— Past all trees, past furze And thorn, where nought deters The desire of the eye For sky, nothing but sky. I sicken of the woods And all the multitudes Of hedge-trees. ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... the older writers see vols. v. 122; vi. 16-49. I may remind the reader that the O. Egyptian "Rokh," or "Rukh," by some written "Rekhit," whose ideograph is a monstrous bird with one claw raised, also denotes pure wise Spirits, the Magi, &c. I know a man who derives from it our "rook" beak ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... cutting one in half with a knife. There are a number of non-analytical people who would be quite prepared to believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with physical conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. Our conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... is informed, that when A plays his rook to B's second Knight's square, and B, moving two squares with his Queen's pawn, gives check to his adversary's Queen, there is no reason why B's Queen should not take A's pawn, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the hill, an' look All down the thickly-timber'd nook, Out where the squier's house do show His grey-wall'd peaks up drough the row O' sheaedy elems, where the rook Do build her nest; an' where the brook Do creep along the meaeds, an' lie To catch the brightness o' the sky; An' cows, in water to their knees, Do stan' ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... the meadow that led down to the river. Yes, there were several rabbits out. With the white marguerites and the dew cobwebs, it was all moon-flowery and white; and the rabbits being there made it perfect. He wanted one badly to model from, and for a moment was tempted to get his rook rifle—but what was the good of a dead rabbit—besides, they looked so happy! He put the glasses down and went towards his greenhouse to get a drawing block, thinking to sit on the wall and make a sort of Midsummer Night's Dream sketch of flowers and rabbits. Someone was there, bending ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... slipped and he fell in, his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does any one sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all his life: he was dead, and that is all. As for granny, she felt no twinge: ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... a fly off yer nose; an' wid that I looked round for a mark, an' I seen in a three foreninst me a lump o' a crow sittin' annoyin' me. 'Will ye quit yer dhrimandhru?' says I, to the botherin' ould rook. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... you thought about God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost. They didn't leave you alone a single minute. God and Jesus stood beside the bed, and Jesus kept God in a good temper, and the Holy Ghost flew about the room and perched on the top of the linen cupboard, and bowed and bowed, and said, "Rook-ke-heroo-oo! Rook-ke-keroo-oo!" ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... fairest Eleanor Audley. The Queen and the Duke of Somerset—rest his soul—would have had us wedded. On the love day, when all walked together to St. Paul's, and the King hoped all was peace, we spoke our vows to one another in the garden of Westminster. She gave me this rook, I gave her the jewel of my cap; I read her true love in her eyes, like our limpid northern brooks. Oh! she was fair, fairer than yonder star in the sunset, but her father, the Lord Audley, was absent, ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the Songster Family,—the Nightingales, the Thrushes, the Mocking-Birds, the Robins; they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... to play with you.' First you shall learn where to move the pieces and how to tell me what Grandy has moved—then, we shall tie a handkerchief over my eyes—as we do when you and I play hide the thimble—my hands shall not touch the men at all. I shall say 'Pawn to Queen's Rook's square' and you shall put this little man here—this is the Queen's Rook's square—" It must have been the oddest game in the world, really, between that stern old man and the blindfolded invalid and the grave little girl who was learning to play. Of course it was easier for Octavia—she didn't ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... The Squire had been nearly brought up to the point. It is painful to come to the conclusion, but Isabella's admirer, though a country gentlemen, was nothing of a sportsman, and rather a poor creature. When Mr. Pickwick and his followers were up early and out at the rook shooting, we find no Trundle. He was lying a-bed, no doubt. Stranger still, when the whole party went in for a day to Muggleton for the cricket match, Trundle was the only one who stayed behind. He remained ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... to a certain extent confirmed by Mr. MacCulloch, who says he is very doubtful as to the occurrence of the Jay in the Island, and adds that the local name for the Mistletoe Thrush is "Geai." Mr. Gallienne, in a note to Professor Ansted's list, confirms the scarcity of the Jay, as he says the Rook and the Jay are rarely seen here, although they are indigenous to Jersey. The local name "Geai" may perhaps have misled him as to the occasional appearance of the Jay. I have never seen a ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... Wharfe in flood, and then continues: "I came home (to the hotel) to quiet tea, and a black kitten called Sweep, who lapped half my cream-jugful (and yet I had plenty), sitting on my shoulder." Grip, the pet rook at Denmark Hill, is mentioned in "My First Editor," as celebrated in verse by Mr. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the cold and rook delighting Heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild, that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that should be ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... expression, and even slightly staggering continuity of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally; but the Rook does not teach pamphleteering literally. And the 'of old' is redundant, for rhyme's sake, since Rooks hold parliaments now as much ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... Hielan Padyane, Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, Far north-wast in a neuck; Be he the coronach had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took. Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook. The Devil sae deaved was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smorit them ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Karraje, Engineer Serko, Captain Spade, and several of their companions took up position on the exterior base of the island. What would I not give to be able follow to them, and in the friendly shelter of a rook watch the on-coming warships! ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... is its attachment to locality that since the incident alluded to in the following Poem took place the Rooks have, many of them, built in fir trees at a little distance from their former habitation. The habits of the Rook are well worthy the attention of all who delight in the study of ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... pier to the topmost round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird's-nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them too; for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in the faith of his ancestors, and ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... ever saw were formal, every one stiff, and speaking by rote, or talking politics. How glad I used to be to get on horseback again! But to see these—why, it is like the shepherd's glimpse at the pixies!—as one reads a new book, or watches what one only half understands—a rook's parliament, or a gathering of sea-fowl on the ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... call me the "Raw Recruit," The joke of the awkward squad, The rook of the rookies to boot, And a bumpkin, a dolt and a clod; But this much I'll plead in defense I seem popular with these chaps, For they keep me a'moving thither and hence ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... forth thy priests, Al Kahlminar, then would I confront them and thee with the two elephants which my brother sent me lately from Geestan, on each of which I can place a rook with a slave cunning with the javelin, before which thy priests will flee; for the animals see no difference between priests and other mortals;—the elephant is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... the words of the prospectus) with "the various world centres." The reading-room was well supplied with "commercial organs." The talk was that of Wall Street; and the pupils (from fifty to a hundred lads) were principally engaged in rooking or trying to rook one another for nominal sums in what was called "college paper." We had class hours, indeed, in the morning, when we studied German, French, book-keeping, and the like goodly matters; but the bulk of our day and ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... his voice died away in the echoes of the cloisters, but of other answer there was none. At that instant a rook, no doubt one of the birds he had disturbed, came diving down, and flapped its wings across the burial-ground. The sight of something, moving there, almost startled Charles out of his senses, and the matter was not much mended ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... From these remains we know that Archoeopteryx differed in some remarkable peculiarities of its structure from all existing members of the class of Birds. This extraordinary Bird (fig. 182) appears to have been about as big as a Rook—the tail being long and extremely slender, and composed of separate vertebrae, each of which supports a single pair of quill-feathers. In the flying Birds of the present day, as before mentioned, the terminal ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... but look! the warning rook Wings home in level flight; The children tired with play and book ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... just to go to the Horse Show, which she drove to with Mrs. Mannering in a hired fly. I don't call it very polite to the hostess, do you? This afternoon she amused herself from her bedroom window by shooting at rabbits just beyond the wire fence of the lawn with a rook rifle; she did not hit any rabbits, but she got a gardener in the leg, and the man was very angry, and bled a great deal, and had to be taken away, and I think it was very careless ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... she quickly learned that Mr. Alphonse Rook—"Phonzie"—spent the greater part of his time at the office of the Manhattan Music Publishing Company, under which auspices ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... London young gentleman who could not hit a hay-stack. My father, who had been used to carrying a gun in his younger days, was much amused, in his quiet way, at seeing Griff watch Chapman off on his rounds, and then betake himself to the locality most remote from the keeper's ears to practise on the rook or crow. Martyn always ran after him, having solemnly promised not to touch the gun, and to keep behind. He was too good-natured to send the little fellow back, though he often tried to elude the pursuit, not wishing for a witness to his attempts; and he never ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... T'an Ch'un exclaimed. "Instead of bracing up your energies now to rook some money out of our venerable senior, you turn ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... in their habits, the ladies of the family grew weary of them and wished to remove them. Accordingly, the colony was driven away, and made their present settlement in a grove behind the house. Ever since that time not a rook has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the least, mamma, thank you," said Fred, sitting up vigorously; "you do not know how strong I am growing." And then turning to the window, he made an effort, and began observing on her rook's nest, as she called it, and her lilac buds. Then came a few more cheerful questions and comments on the late notes, and then Mrs. Frederick Langford proposed that the reading of the service ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Sir James spared no pains to win their good will. He gave the Terror a rook-rifle and Erebus boxes of chocolate. If he chanced on them when motoring in the afternoon he would carry them off, bicycles and all, in his car and regale them with sumptuous teas at the Grange; and at Colet House he entertained ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... on her eggs. By and by, when they are busy with family cares, feeding the little ones, and teaching them to fly, there is not much time for singing. It is said that every bird has a different note or call. I wonder how many you know? I fancy I can guess: the cock, the rook, the swallow, the thrush, the blackbird, the lark; if you do not know the notes or calls of all these, try ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... Sir," he answered, with a portentous emphasis,—"Mrs. Clamp,—united to me, Sir, this morning, by the Reverend Mr. Rook, in the holy bands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Friendly was Familiar. Or, if he tuned his lofty lays, With solemn air to Virtue's praise, Alike abusive and erroneous, They call'd it hoarse and inharmonious. Yet so it was to souls like theirs, Tuneless as Abel to the bears! A Rook[5] with harsh malignant caw Began, was follow'd by a Daw;[6] (Though some, who would be thought to know, Are positive it was a crow:) Jack Daw was seconded by Tit, Tom Tit[7] could write, and so he writ; A tribe of tuneless praters follow, The ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... steered for Pernambuco—perhaps, next to Rio, the port of the greatest importance in the Brazils. On going into the harbour with a strong breeze blowing, the pilot from gross carelessness gave the Triton so hard a blow against a rook that an ugly hole was knocked in her bottom. It seemed for a moment that the masts would have gone by the board; but the ship, bounding off the rock, glided on as if nothing had happened. It was a great trial for the temper of Captain Frankland; but he uttered scarcely ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... disappears with the first moult; but among the next young families there are always a few pied ones." These changes of plumage, which appear and are inherited at various corresponding periods of life in the pigeon, canary-bird, and rook, are remarkable, because the parent-species undergo ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... statement. "He's a strange mixture, is Mr. Hilton. He's a fair nailer with a revolver. I've seen him hit a penny three times straight off at twelve paces, and, when in the mind, he would bowl over running rabbits with a rook rifle. Yet he never joined the shooting parties in October. Said it made him ill to see graceful birds shattered by clumsy folk. All the same, he would ill-treat a horse something ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... what bird she thought I meant. She said, 'A nightingale.' This made me so angry that I nearly flung her to the ground: 'No, fool! ... Rook!' said I." ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... King. In this case the move is correct, as the threat of mate ties the Black Rook to his rank. It is wrong to make a loophole, as weak players are fond of doing, as early as possible "in case," before it is shown that there will be a need for it, or that there will be a ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... the 'root' had been striking then, or rather, that the seeds, whence the roots take leisure and grow, they had been planted then—and might not a good heart and hand drop acorns enough to grow up into a complete Dodona-grove,—when the very rook, say farmers, hides and forgets whole navies of ship-wood one day to be, in his summer storing-journeys? But this shall do—I am not going to prove what may be, when here it is, to my ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... still rages. These are: (a) how Greek utilized the four sibilants (Shin, Samech, Zain and Zade), which it rook over from the Phoenician; (b) what was the history of development in the symbols for f, ch, ps, o (the history of x belongs to both heads); (c) the history of the symbol ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... torrent will not reach the lake without disporting itself into many little cataracts; and saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were grey, forget all the gratifications and all the guilt of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... proceeded to describe a coffee-house in detail. The room "stinks of tobacco worse than hell of brimstone;" the coffee itself had the appearance of "Pluto's diet-drink, that witches tipple out of dead men's skulls;" and the company included "a silly fop and a worshipful justice, a griping rook and a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer and an errant pickpocket, a reverend non-conformist and a canting mountebank, all blended together to compose an oglio of impertinence." There is a delightful sketch of one named "Captain All-man-sir," ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... should like to meet someone who had read "The Rock of Horeb." I once sailed from Peru in an exceedingly ill-found little barque loaded with guano. We had a very dull time going through the tropics, and absolutely the only thing to read on board was the first half of "The Rook of Horeb." There were at least two pages missing. I read it until I nearly knew it off by heart, and ever since I've been trying to get a complete copy to see how ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Nassau Street, and a steam-boiler or something burst under the sidewalk and broke his leg? The first thing old Backbite said when he heard of it was, 'H'm! been drinking, I suppose.' Now here's Billings with a despatch. What is it, bully rook?" he hailed, as ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... hate to learn the ebb of time From yon dull steeple's drowsy chime, Or mark it as the sunbeams crawl, Inch after inch, along the wall. The lark was wont my matins ring, The sable rook my vespers sing: These towers, although a king's they be, Have not a hall of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... he housed us, In this nook, Where Love like balm has drowsed us: Robin, rook, Our chief familiars, next to ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... There had been a great crying out of many people of the lower sort that crowded the terrace before the garden. Now the rain fell, and all was desolation. A yeoman in brown fustian ran bending his head before the tempestuous rain. A rook, blown impotently backwards, essayed slowly to cross towards the western trees. Her eyes followed him until a great gust blew him in a wider curve, backwards and up, and when again he steadied himself he was no more ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... Stylites inhabited; for you must have climbed a ladder to have looked out of the window, and then the vision of no short-sighted man could have got over the interval in the wall made by the narrow casement, which, after all, gave no other prospect than a Cumberland sky, with an occasional rook in it. But my father, I think I have said before, did not much care for scenery, and he looked round with great satisfaction upon the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thrushes, the mocking birds, the robins; they differ in the greater or lesser perfection of their note, but the same kind of voice runs through the whole group. Does not every member of the Crow family caw, whether it be a Jackdaw, the Jay, or the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long melancholy caw that seems to make ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... The rook has a most abiding affection for Walnuts. As soon as there is any fruit on the trees worth eating, this bird finds it out, and brings it to the ground, choosing only those nuts which are soft enough for him ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... scarecrow. For et didn' seem like no ord'nary scarecrow, sir, wi' that eye a-glintin' in the sunshine. I cou'd see 't from where I sot—an' so the birds thought. Well, wan arter another, they steps up an' flies off as ef hurried for time, when by-'m-by 'long comes an ould rook. ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I had had enough of garrison duty, even could I have got back my commission, which was not very likely. So I put soldiering out of the question; and yet, when I had done so, I was infernally puzzled to think of any thing better. I had no fancy to turn rook, and rove from place to place in search of pigeons—no uncommon resource with younger brothers of an idle turn and exhausted means. I had fallen in with a few birds of that breed, and had come to the conclusion that to save ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... vols. v. 122; vi. 16-49. I may remind the reader that the O. Egyptian "Rokh," or "Rukh," by some written "Rekhit," whose ideograph is a monstrous bird with one claw raised, also denotes pure wise Spirits, the Magi, &c. I know a man who derives from it our "rook" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... then blew his horn, To let the neighbors know, This was Robin's wedding-day, And they might see the show. And first came Parson Rook, With his spectacles and band, And one of Mother Hubbard's books He held within ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... and I,' replied the host, 'are going out rook-shooting before breakfast. He's a very ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... nor in the water, in field or forest, was there a woman to be found. Vain things were plenty—there was the turkey, and the swan, and the blue jay, and the wood-duck, and the wakon bird; and noisy, chattering, singing creatures, such as the daw, and the thrush, and the rook, and the prairie-dog, abounded—indeed there were more of each than was pleasing to the ear—but of women, vain, noisy, laughing, chattering women, there were none. It was, indeed, quite a still world to what it is now. Whether it is better and happier, will depend much ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... whom I had appointed corporal, will soon be reduced to the ranks; the animal is spoiled by sheer drink. Having been drunk every day in Khartoum, and now being separated from his liquor, he is plunged into a black melancholy. He sits upon the luggage like a sick rook, doing minstrelsy, playing the rababa (guitar), and smoking the whole day, unless asleep, which is half that time: he is sighing after the merissa (beer) pots of Egypt. This man is an illustration of missionary success. He was ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... of the Mackenzies will take A white rook out of the wood, And will take a wife from a music-house With his people against him. And the heir will be great In deeds, and as an orator, When the Pope in Rome Will be cast off his throne, Over opposite Creagh-a'-chon Will dwell a ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... fate, And orphans for their parents' timeless death,— Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born. The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, And chatt'ring pies in dismal discord sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope, An indigested and deformed lump, Not ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the moon. You go and try. It ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... found of us, yet afterwards a farm-boy brought a tale of how he had come suddenly on men lurking under a wall, and how one had a bloody foot and leg, and how the other sprung upon him and after a fierce struggle wrenched his master's rook-piece from his hands, rifled his pocket of a powder-horn, and made off with them like a hare towards Corfe. And as to Maskew, some of the soldiers said that Elzevir had shot him, and others that ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... gowns, the whole pavement of the church was covered with a fairly representative collection of cast-off kitchen utensils—old kettles, broken cake-tins, frying-pans, saucepans—all calculated to emit dismal sounds under percussion. Scattered among these were ox-bells, rook-rattles, a fog-horn or two, and a tin trumpet from Liskeard fair. Explanation is simple: the outraged feelings of the parish were to be avenged by a shal-lal as bride and bridegroom left the church. Ruby knew nothing of the storm ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mansion the air was loud with the chirping of thrushes, the cawing of partridges and the clear sweet note of the rook, while deer, antelope and other quadrupeds strutted about the lawn so tame as to eat off the sun-dial. In fact, the ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... scurry, a rush, and they fly up as if shot out of the tree-tops. There is a flapping of wings, and much angry sound; they circle once or twice, and then sink back to their homes again. It is a beautiful sight to watch a rook volplaning down to a tree as you can watch them from the terraces at Lynton; moving on a level with your eye, you can see the detail of each movement of their wings, see them let themselves drop through the air, yet with muscles taut and legs and claws stretched ready for a foothold ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... or my wife, or servant Saurea—do your best, swindle us, rook us, I promise you your interests won't suffer, if you ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... west. It stopped before a large shaded lawn, where a number of white men and women were playing a game with cards. The cards used by the lawn party were not ordinary playing-cards, but had figures on them instead of spots, and were called "rook" cards. The party of white ladies and gentlemen were playing "rook." On a table in the middle of the lawn glittered some pieces of silver plate which formed the first, second, and third prizes ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... exaggerated. Certainly he is devoted to himself; but if he were an eagerly ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money enough, did not exert himself greatly to ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the true story of a little East Side tailor who could not earn enough to support himself and his wife. He became half-crazed from lack of food and together they resolved to commit suicide. Somehow he secured a small 22-caliber rook rifle and a couple of cartridges. The wife knelt down on the bed in her nightgown, with her face to the wall, and repeated a prayer while he shot her in the back. When he saw her sink to the floor dead he became so unnerved that, instead ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... himself by picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task. At the same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit his harsh, throaty hunger-call. The rook gone, he would drop ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the wind being at east-south-east, I could not fetch it, wherefore I kept on to the southward, and stemmed with the body of a high island about eleven or twelve leagues long, lying to the southward of that which I before designed for. I named this island Sir George Rook's Island. ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... of the train, the vibration caused by the unusual rate of speed over the very rough rails was excessive; it was, however, consolatory to feel that any little unpleasantness which might occur through the fact of the car leaving the track would be attended with some sense of alleviation. The rook is said to have thought he was paying dear for good company when he was put into the pigeon pie, but it by no means follows that a leap from an embankment, or an upset into a river, would be as disastrous as is usually supposed, if taken in the society of such pillars of the state ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... glaring silence across their intercourse. As the term of that respite drew to an end his anxiety increased, until at last it even trenched upon his well-earned sleep. He had some idea of buying a revolver. At last he compromised upon a small and very foul and dirty rook rifle which he purchased in Lammam under a pretext of bird scaring, and loaded carefully and concealed under his bed from the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... to love their song, when lingering morn Streak'd o'er the chilly landskip the dim light, And thro' the open'd lattice hung my head To view the snow-drop's bud: and thence at eve When mildly fading sunk the summer sun, Oft have I loved to mark the rook's slow course And hear his hollow croak, what time he sought The church-yard elm, whose wide-embowering boughs Full foliaged, half conceal'd the house of God. There, my dead father! often have I heard Thy hallowed voice ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... falls on the wood in thuds, "God, God." The cry of the rook, "God," answers it The crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the same name; All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby, Wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap Repeat in a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... failed to provide his master with a stimulant and irritant. On the morning following on Christian's return it was very evident that intelligence of unusual greatness seethed in the cauldron wherein fermented Mr. Evans' brew of news. His rook-like eye sparkled, his movements, even that walk for whose disabilities it may be remembered that the pantry boy had thanked his God, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the time that an unforeseen reply takes your Queen. No chess-player sleeps well. After the painful strategy of the day one fights one's battles over again. You see with more than daylight clearness that it was the Rook you should have moved, and not the Knight. No! it is impossible! no common sinner innocent of chess knows these lower deeps of remorse. Vast desert boards lie for the chess-player beyond the gates of horn. Stalwart Rooks ram headlong at one, Knights hop sidelong, one's ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... act, on reaching the fresh air, was to examine the contents of the pocket-book. As he anticipated, it was crammed full of notes of the first Treasury issue. He did not take them out to count them; a rook, watching him curiously from the edge of the wood, warned him of the danger ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... stepped upon the piazza, and saw the drooping head, the dangling arms, and the changed face of her husband. "Dead! dead!" she exclaimed. "My God! what has happened? Mildred, who was with him? Was the doctor sent for? or Squire Clamp? or Mr. Rook? What did he say to you, dear?" And she tried to lift up the sobbing child, who still clung to the stiffening knees where she had so often climbed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... utterance. Or, take as an example the web-footed family: Do not all the geese and the innumerable host of ducks quack? Does not every member of the crow family caw, whether it be the jackdaw, the jay, or the magpie, the rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the songster family—the nightingales, the thrushes, the mocking-birds, the robins; they differ in the greater or less ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... no precocious rook, who Haunts the high hall garden calling "Maud;" Mine's no "blithe newcomer" like the cuckoo ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... since gone to his rest, but his name remains green among the villagers. To-day the traveler can see his elevated grave at Tigme[a]rook, about six miles east of the village of Tigara, at which place his career came to a sudden end through the agency of an arrow driven by the bow ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... had often done on lesser occasions, she packed up a bundle of articles, crept down again, and went out of the house. She had a place of refuge in these cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been. This place was Rook's Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery's part when that young woman was ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... for their Parents timeles death, Shall rue the houre that euer thou was't borne. The Owle shriek'd at thy birth, an euill signe, The Night-Crow cry'de, aboding lucklesse time, Dogs howl'd, and hiddeous Tempest shook down Trees: The Rauen rook'd her on the Chimnies top, And chatt'ring Pies in dismall Discords sung: Thy Mother felt more then a Mothers paine, And yet brought forth lesse then a Mothers hope, To wit, an indigested and deformed lumpe, Not like the fruit of such a goodly Tree. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... yielded again to her distraught imagination, amid the pitiful ejaculations of the entire company, with the exception of one mundane, young man who, suddenly assailed by the wild fancy that he wasn't drinking, crept furtively to the Moorish rook, and ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... I look to the thickening rook, An' watch by the midnight tide; I ken the wind brings my rover hame, An' the sea that he glories to ride. Oh, merry he sits 'mang his jovial crew, Wi' the helm heft in his hand, An' he sings aloud to his boys in blue, As his e'e's ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the town sounded so shrill and poor after that, which I considered mine especially. There are rooks flying home to the elms in the Close. I wonder if they are the same that used to be there when I was a girl. They say the rook is a very long-lived bird, and I feel as if I could swear to the way they are cawing. Ay, you may smile, Ellinor, but I understand now those lines of Gray's you used to say ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm. Many a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions should look forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle whose nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. How sad that ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... it? No doubt there are experts to whom a wood-pigeon's nest is something apart and distinct from the nest of the magpie, but to your unsophisticated amateur a nest that is large may be anything—rook's, magpie's, pigeon's, or great auk's. To such an one the only true test lies in the eggs. Solvitur ambulando. Barrett laid the pill-boxes, containing the precious specimens he had found in the nest at the top of the hill, at the foot of the tree, ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... we have always with us, and on windy days even the large-sized rook is blown about the murkiness which does duty for sky over London; and on such occasions its coarse, corvine dronings seem not unmusical, nor without something of a tonic effect on our jarred nerves. And here the ordinary Londoner has got to the end of his ornithological ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... a great mouth, until he looked like an old rook which is about to caw, the Councillor would stamp his foot several times, as though preparing to dance to the boys' shouting, and lower his head, grasp his umbrella like a bayonet, and charge at the lads with ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... added the Swallow's, the Martin's, the Wood Pigeon's, and the Wood-Pecker's. Of the nests of Rooks, it may be sufficient to observe, that they are often found to the number of six, or even more in a cluster. Crows' nests are always solitary; they are similar in structure to those of the rook. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... immediately filled up. But the original difficulty remains; for if your farmers had not killed your sparrows and rooks, what would have become of those which now immigrate into your parish? in the middle of England one is too far distant from the natural limits of the rook and sparrow to suppose that the young are thus far expelled from Cambridgeshire. The check must fall heavily at some time of each species' life; for, if one calculates that only half the progeny are reared and bred, how enormous is the increase! One has, however, no business to feel so much ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... something fit to make us think. Far off on the clear gray sky appears a wavering speck which rises and falls and sways from side to side in an extraordinary way. Nearer and nearer the speck comes, until at last we find ourselves standing under a rook which flies with great difficulty. The poor rascal looks most disreputable, for his tail has evidently been shot away, and he is wounded. He drops on to a perch, but not before he has run the gauntlet of several lines of sharp eyes. The poor bird sits on his branch swinging weakly to and fro, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... exquisite and most varied. Immediately beneath her lay Willesden,—the most charming and secluded village in the neighbourhood of the metropolis—with its scattered farm-houses, its noble granges, and its old grey church-tower just peeping above a grove of rook-haunted trees. ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and he does not recollect that a ploughman's mind wants to lie fallow a little, and can't give a crop every year. It is hard to make rope when your hemp is all used up, or pancakes without batter, or rook pie without the birds; and so I found it hard to write more when I had said just about all I knew. Giving much to the poor doth increase a man's store, but it is not the same with writing; at least, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... Patmos, about ten or twelve feet square. The window looked down the rocky sides into an ocean of seething mist. I opened it, but could see nothing of all those scenes he describes so graphically from this spot. I thought of his playful letter on the "Diet of the Rooks," but there was not a rook at hand to illustrate antiquity. There was his bedstead and footstool, a mammoth vertebra, and his writing table. A sculptured chair, the back of which is carved into a cherub's head, bending forward and shadowing with its wings the head of the sitter, was ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "Oh, I rook, awr right. I just not see. My name is Aronzo, Rootenant, and I stay here awr the time and guard everything for Princess Ryra. I prease to meet you and I wirr run errands for you, and do things rike mair your retters, ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... The sable has quite disappeared, being found only on the Urals; the beaver is found at a few places in Minsk, and the otter is very rare. On the other hand, the hare and also the grey partridge, the hedgehog, the quail, the lark, the rook, and the stork find their way into the coniferous region as the forests are cleared. The avifauna is very rich; it includes all the forest and garden birds which are known in western Europe, as well as a very great variety ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... to the castle before it was too late. I carried the lady into her rook, and they ran for a surgeon and a midwife. It was no good, however, for in five minutes the count came out and said the countess had just been happily delivered. The dean looked as if a weight had been taken off his mind; however, he took the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that a rook by wearing a pied feather, The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff, A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot On his French garters, should affect a humour! O, it ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... Colonel Warren, my host, and under his roof, the morning after my arrival, I first definitely felt that I had left the West behind me, when I found that a noise by which I had been just awakened, and which sounded like the cawing of a rook, was that of the muezzin borne from a neighboring minaret and ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... tailing, and had loaded the waggon with thirty of them for market the next day. I having carried the thirty sacks into the waggon myself, now washed, cleaned, and dressed myself, and had joined my friends in the field, partaking of the sport of rook shooting, before half-past six in the evening; and I took care that my three fellow-labourers should be rewarded with the first three dozen of young rooks that were killed. As a proof that the corn was well winnowed, my father sold it ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the beginning of March, coming back from a long walk on the hills, I heard the bleat of the lamb and the impatient cawing of the rook that could not put its nest together in the windy branches, and as I stopped to listen it seemed to me that something passed by in the dusk: the spring-tide itself seemed to be fleeting across the tillage towards the scant fields. As the spring-tide advanced I discovered a new likeness ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... short time, though even then his early impressions do not altogether fade. But if we lay hold of him, bring him to our Homes, surround him with Christian influences, by God's help we make a man of him, and the raw recruit, the 'rook' as they call him, not only develops into a veteran ready to go anywhere and do anything for Queen and country, but into a Soldier of the Cross, ready to do ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... beautiful, surpassing their relatives found in other parts of the world. There are numerous varieties, differing in size—from the trogon viridis, scarcely larger than a sparrow, to the beautiful trogon, with its handsome tail, the size of a rook. Often they are to be seen in the depths of the forest, sitting motionless for hours together, simply moving their heads, watching apparently for insects, or sometimes scanning the neighbouring trees for fruit. Having selected ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... applied himself in vain. There is always some practical result to show which will be useful to others. In technical literature he published a description of the Conway and Britannia Tubular Bridges as long ago as 1849. There is a valuable communication of his in the Board of Trade Blue Rook on Submarine Cables. In 1868, he issued a useful work on ELECTRICAL MEASUREMENTS, and in 1871 joined with Mr. Robert Sabine in producing the well-known ELECTRICAL TABLES AND FORMULAE, a work which was for a long time the electrician's VADE-MECUM. In 1873, he communicated a lengthy paper on the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... the loss of her young and her own liberty. And he who regarded in olden time the conduct of man toward the brutes, to-day looks down from heaven and is interested in every minnow that swims the stream, and every rook that cleaves the ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... is in the Lord, My works I count but dust; I build not there, but on his word, And in his goodness trust. Up to his care myself I yield; He is my tower, my rook, my shield, And for his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... stillness all about him. When the wind was rumbling in the chimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the house. When the old trees outside were so shaken and beaten, that one querulous old rook, unable to sleep, protested now and then, in a feeble, dozy, high-up "Caw!" When, at intervals, the window trembled, the rusty vane upon the turret-top complained, the clock beneath it recorded that another quarter of an hour was gone, or the ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... furnish a text for some comic drawings, thus reversing the usual order of illustration. The pictures were intended to poke fun at a club of sportsmen; and Dickens, who knew nothing of sport, bravely set out with Mr. Winkle on his rook-shooting. Then, while the story was appearing in monthly numbers, the illustrator committed suicide; Dickens was left with Mr. Pickwick on his hands, and that innocent old gentleman promptly ran away with the author. Not being in the least ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... him. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath lay, like a thread of darker woof. We followed it from field to field and from stile to stile. It was the way to church. At the church we finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the work-day world by the broad stillness of pastures—a gray, gray tower, a huge black yew, a cluster of village graves, with crooked headstones, in grassy, low relief. The whole scene was deeply ecclesiastical. My companion ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... chasing each other through endless mazes, and in their flight they made the air sound with an infinitude of discordant noises. In the midst of these playful exertions it unfortunately happened that one rook, by a sudden turn, struck his beak against the wing of another. The sufferer instantly fell into the river. A general cry of distress ensued. The birds hovered with every expression of anxiety over their ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... rook {206} went among the crows (black birds), and they asked him, "Where did you steal your white coat?" And he told (them), "I stole it from a fool of a pigeon." Then he went among the pigeons and said, "How are you, brothers?" And they asked him, "Where ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... right bank of the Seine, is one of the most charming villages in the environs of Paris, despite the infernal etymology of its name. The gay and thoughtless Parisian, who, on Sunday, wanders about the fields, more destructive than the rook, has not yet discovered this smiling country. The distressing odor of the frying from coffee-gardens does not there stifle the perfume of the honeysuckles. The refrains of bargemen, the brazen voices ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... everything can shine. By just partition of our gifts divine, Each has its full and proper share. Among the birds that cleave the air The hawk's a swift, the eagle is a brave one, For omens serves the hoarse old raven, The rook's of coming ills the prophet; And if there's any discontent, I've heard not of it. Cease, then, your envious complaint; Or I, instead of making up your lack, Will take your boasted plumage ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... with grave, but gentle look— His silence sweet with sounds With which the simple-hearted Spring abounds: Lowing of cattle from the abbey grounds, Chirping of insect, and the building rook, Mingled like murmurs of a dreaming shell; Quaint tracery of bird and branch and brook Flitting across the pages of his book, Until the very words a freshness took— Deep in his cell, Sate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... helped him to embark them and sail them in the bath to foreign parts, trapped a squirrel and let it go again, allowed him to make havoc of his possessions, fired at bottles with his revolver for the boy's delectation, shot a crow or two with a rook-rifle, played an improvised game of fives with a tennis-ball, told him tales, and generally gave up the day to his amusement. What he did not do was to repeat the experiment of a year ago, or make any ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... many poems that may be used in connection with the Nature Study lessons. To supplement the observational studies of birds, read from the Third Reader, "The Robin's Song", "The Red-winged Blackbird", "The Sandpiper", "To the Cuckoo", "Bob White", "The Lark and the Rook", "The Poet's Song". ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... experiment also shows that they help comrades in distress. If a Wolf or a Rook be ill or injured, we are told that it is driven away or even killed by its comrades. Not so with Ants. For instance, in one of my nests an unfortunate Ant, in emerging from the chrysalis skin, injured her legs so much that she lay on her back quite helpless. For three months, however, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... in the great green elms, then suddenly there is a caw, a scurry, a rush, and they fly up as if shot out of the tree-tops. There is a flapping of wings, and much angry sound; they circle once or twice, and then sink back to their homes again. It is a beautiful sight to watch a rook volplaning down to a tree as you can watch them from the terraces at Lynton; moving on a level with your eye, you can see the detail of each movement of their wings, see them let themselves drop through the air, yet with muscles taut and legs and claws stretched ready for ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... entered to give directions for their disposing. Nor was it till the hour of sunset that everything was in due order, the straps set fast, the keys duly turned in the locks—the labels—"Mr. Eustace Greyne: Passenger to Algiers: via Marseilles"—carefully written out in a full, round hand. Rook's tickets had been bought; so now everything was ready, and the last evening in England might be spent by Mr. Greyne in the drawing-room and by Darrell in the servants' ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... and turn them against me? Oh, you! Did I say the 'root' had been striking then, or rather, that the seeds, whence the roots take leisure and grow, they had been planted then—and might not a good heart and hand drop acorns enough to grow up into a complete Dodona-grove,—when the very rook, say farmers, hides and forgets whole navies of ship-wood one day to be, in his summer storing-journeys? But this shall do—I am not going to prove what may be, when here it is, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Robin, or Parson Rook with his little book?' said Lance, throwing the pen-wiper in ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... left-hand corner to the top right-hand corner, also the five cells in the diagonal next above it and the cell in the bottom right-hand corner. The answer for six couples will be the same as the number of ways in which you can place six rooks (not using the cancelled cells) so that no rook shall ever attack another rook. It will be found that the six rooks may be placed in eighty different ways, which agrees with ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... his last solution was a pleasant little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old bureau—for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was hung with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of books. But as it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes played with on the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf was a tin with three or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer went up and down that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma he went ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Sciences at Paris, in which he aptly compared it, in its uses, to the trunk of an elephant. In its manners it is gentle and familiar, and when approached raises a cry which may be compared to a hoarse croaking. In its gait it resembles the rook, and walks much better than most ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money enough, did not exert himself greatly to acquire reputation ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Then a rook went over and cawed, and Bevis, looking up at the bird, caught a glimpse of the swing over the wall—it stood under the sycamore tree. Dropping the bit of apple, away he ran to the swing, and sat in it, and pushed himself off. As he swung forward he straightened his legs and leant ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... castle, the people of the country thought it was a judgment of Heaven upon him. In his rage for improvement the fellow dared anything. Without my orders he cut down an old rookery which was sacred in the country, and had a prophecy regarding it, stating, 'When the rook-wood shall fall, down goes Hackton Hall.' The rooks went over and colonised Tiptoff Woods, which lay near us (and be hanged to them!), and Cornichon built a temple to Venus and two lovely fountains on their site. Venuses and ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dimmed by obscure expression, and even slightly staggering continuity of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally; but the Rook does not teach pamphleteering literally. And the 'of old' is redundant, for rhyme's sake, since Rooks hold parliaments now as ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... dairy-woman! How could such a bewitching creature so lack refinement! The more he thought, the more inexplicable and self-contradictory her conduct appeared. Such a jewelled-humming-bird to make friends with a grubbing rook! The smell of the leather, not to mention the paste and glue, would be enough for any properly sensitive girl! Universally fascinating, why did she not correspond all through? Brought out in London, she would be the belle of the season! If he did not secure her, some poor ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... heard if they slept well that night; after such unusual excitement it was hardly to be expected they would. But Griselda, being a little girl and not a rook, was so tired that two minutes after she had tucked herself up in bed she was quite sound asleep, and did not wake for ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... crows, keep well his comb, For the fox and the fulmart they are false both. When the raven and the rook have rounded together, And the kid in his cliff shall accord to the same. Then shall they be bold, and soon to battle thereafter. Then the birds of the raven rugs and reives, And the leal men of Lothian, are louping on their horse; ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... by, when they are busy with family cares, feeding the little ones, and teaching them to fly, there is not much time for singing. It is said that every bird has a different note or call. I wonder how many you know? I fancy I can guess: the cock, the rook, the swallow, the thrush, the blackbird, the lark; if you do not know the notes or calls of all these, try to ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... garden with Offitt, and turned down a filthy alley to a squalid tenement house,—called by its proprietor Perry Place, and by the neighbors Rook's Ranch,—to the lodge-room of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners, which proved to be Offitt's lodging. They found there a half dozen men lounging about the entrance, who scowled and swore at Offitt for being late, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... sheer libel," he answered presently. "Larssen could rook you for goodness knows what damages if you got ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the churchyard, embracing the vicarage-house, a comfortable residence, surrounded by a large walled-in garden, well stocked with fruit-trees, and sheltered by a fine grove of rook-haunted timber, extended on the one hand over the village, and on the other over the Abbey, and was bounded by the towering and well-wooded heights of Whalley Nab. On the side of the Abbey, the most conspicuous objects were the great north-eastern ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... on the wood in thuds, "God, God." The cry of the rook, "God," answers it The crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the same name; All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby, Wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap Repeat in a thousand ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... masters, William and Robert of Pickering, Adam de Bruce and Mathilda his wife." The two beautifully carved figures of a knight and his lady that lie in the Bruce Chapel are not Bruces for the surcoat of the man is adorned with the arms of the Rockcliffes—an heraldic chess-rook and three lions' heads. Both the knight and his lady wear the collar of SS, the origin of which is still wrapped in obscurity. Traces of gilding are visible in several places on the wings of the angels that support the heads of both figures, as well as in other parts of ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... saw the cold and rook delighting Heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild, that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season With the hot ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... door-way and were soon treading the walls that had once sustained the cannon and the sentinel, but were now covered with weeds and wild flowers. The drum and fife had once been heard within these walls—the only music now is the cawing of the rook and daw. We paid a hasty visit to the various apartments, remaining longest in those of most interest. The room in which Martin the Regicide was imprisoned nearly twenty years, was pointed out to us. The Castle of Chepstow is still a magnificent pile, towering upon the brink of a stupendous ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... those inexcusable oversights which will sometimes afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms of one of her pawns. It was her first ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... provide his master with a stimulant and irritant. On the morning following on Christian's return it was very evident that intelligence of unusual greatness seethed in the cauldron wherein fermented Mr. Evans' brew of news. His rook-like eye sparkled, his movements, even that walk for whose disabilities it may be remembered that the pantry boy had thanked his God, were ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... scansorial birds—are the most beautiful, surpassing their relatives found in other parts of the world. There are numerous varieties, differing in size—from the trogon viridis, scarcely larger than a sparrow, to the beautiful trogon, with its handsome tail, the size of a rook. Often they are to be seen in the depths of the forest, sitting motionless for hours together, simply moving their heads, watching apparently for insects, or sometimes scanning the neighbouring trees for fruit. Having selected a ripe one, they dart off now and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... to butter; and he does not recollect that a ploughman's mind wants to lie fallow a little, and can't give a crop every year. It is hard to make rope when your hemp is all used up, or pancakes without batter, or rook pie without the birds; and so I found it hard to write more when I had said just about all I knew. Giving much to the poor doth increase a man's store, but it is not the same with writing; at least, I am such a poor scribe that I don't find it come because ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... he had rare discrimination of relative chances in the run of the cards, or the phenomenally bold hand he played disconcerted his adversaries, but his almost invariable winning began to affect injuriously his character. Indeed, he was said to be a rook of unrivalled rapacity. Colonel Duval was in the frame of mind that his wife called "bearish" one morning as his family gathered for breakfast in the limited privacy of their circle about the round table in ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... eyes a little. "What! the millionaire?... Good biz! We'll rook him at poker and bridge and shooting, and a few other things. It isn't right for him to have all that money. It would even things up a little if we could transfer some of it to poor, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... manned; we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose in the midst of us. "Doey, get beyond me, zur; doey, Mr Rattlin," he would say. "Ah! zur, I'd climb with any bragger in this ship for a rook's nest, where I ha' got a safe bough to stand upon; but to dance upon this here see-sawing line, and to call it a ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... terrible, and the clamour of the people soundeth in my ears already. If Shibli Bagarag fail in one stroke, where be we? 'Tis certain I knew not the might in Shagpat when I strove with him, and he's powerful beyond the measure of man's subtlety; and yonder flies a rook without fellow—an omen; and all's ominous, and ominous of ill: and I marked among the troop of slaves that preceded Baba Mustapha one that squinted, and that's an omen; and, O my daughter, I counsel that thou by thy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Mac Fadyane,[63] Far northward in a nook, By he the Correnoch had done shout,[64] Ersch-men[65] so gather'd him about In hell great room they took: These termagants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersch began to clatter, And roup[66] like raven and rook. The devil so deaved[67] was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smored[68] them ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... The same prejudices and generous beliefs had been hers, but held loosely with a child's comprehension. But now this old world had been awakened to arms against a dazzling new world of love and pleasure. She was led captive by emotion, but the cold rook of scruple remained. She had read of women surrendering all for love, but she felt dismally that this happy gift had been denied her. Criticism, a fierce, vulgar antagonism, impervious to sentiment, not to be exorcised by generous impulse—such ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... two to make matters interesting. Of course there ought to be jungle-cats and birds of prey and other agencies of sudden death to add to the illusion of liberty, but the bird's own imagination is capable of inventing those—look how a domestic fowl will squawk an alarm note if a rook or wood pigeon passes over its run when it ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... tricks!" exclaimed Bucklaw—"your cold calculating manoeuvres, which old gentlemen in wrought nightcaps and furred gowns execute like so many games at chess, and displace a treasurer or lord commissioner as they would take a rook or a pawn. Tennis for my sport, and battle for my earnest! And you, Master, so dep and considerate as you would seem, you have that within you makes the blood boil faster than suits your present humour of moralising on political truths. ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... the Stylites inhabited; for you must have climbed a ladder to have looked out of the window, and then the vision of no short-sighted man could have got over the interval in the wall made by the narrow casement, which, after all, gave no other prospect than a Cumberland sky, with an occasional rook in it. But my father, I think I have said before, did not much care for scenery, and he looked round with great satisfaction upon the retreat ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fit with its hair-like stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania. Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and the region of ineffectuality and incompleteness. The only cultivators here, and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are the rook and mole: and yet the land is rich enough—the fat deep crumbling of the shale and ironstone returning year by year into the mud, from whence it hardened ages since. There are scores of farms of far worse land in mid-England, under 'a four-course shift,' ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... The Dhar'rook and Gun'dungur'ra tribes respectively occupied the from the mouth of the Hawkesbury river to Mount Victoria, and thence southerly to Berrima and Goulburn, New South Wales. On the south and southeast they were joined by the Thurrawal, ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... the castle before it was too late. I carried the lady into her rook, and they ran for a surgeon and a midwife. It was no good, however, for in five minutes the count came out and said the countess had just been happily delivered. The dean looked as if a weight had been taken off his mind; ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the picture of the grey old house of God rising calm before me, of a rook wheeling round the steeple, of a ruddy morning sky beyond. I remember something, too, of the green grave-mounds; and I have not forgotten, either, two figures of strangers straying amongst the low hillocks and reading ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Nanny," said Skedlock, laying his hand on the old woman's shoulder, "yo known what a hard job it is to keep th' bant i'th nick wi' a rook o' musicianers. They cap'n the world for bein' diversome, an' jealous, an' bad to plez. Well, as I wur sayin'—they'n had a deeal o' trouble about music this year or two back, up at th' owd chapel. Th' singers fell out wi' th' players. They mostly dun do. An' th' players ...
— Th' Barrel Organ • Edwin Waugh
... Ogwen was entirely new made, of a uniform width of 28 feet between the parapets, with an inclination of only 1 in 22 in the steepest place. A bridge was thrown over the deep chasm forming the channel of the Ogwen, the embankment being carried forward from the rook cutting, protected by high breastworks. From Capel-Curig to near the great waterfall over the river Lugwy, about a mile of new road was cut; and a still greater length from Bettws across the river Conway and along the face of Dinas Hill to Rhyddlanfair, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... soul, yielded again to her distraught imagination, amid the pitiful ejaculations of the entire company, with the exception of one mundane, young man who, suddenly assailed by the wild fancy that he wasn't drinking, crept furtively to the Moorish rook, and was ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... dinner in the shadow of the library-door. He sleeps in his turret with a complaining flag- staff over his head, and has some leads outside on which, any fine morning when he is down here, his black figure may be seen walking before breakfast like a larger species of rook. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... as he called the canal. When his feet slipped and he fell in, his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does any one sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all his life: he was dead, and that is all. As for granny, she felt no twinge: she had ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... premium,—about two dollars and eighty cents at this time,—and our cotton sold for one dollar and fifty cents per pound. The "Neimen" went into dock, and people came in hundreds to see the strange sight. She was covered with shells like a rook. Some of these shells were sent out to China, and Messrs. Russell & Co. (the owners) had them ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... the Stanleys, and The Dell, owned, and inhabited at intervals, by Mr. Young-Dickson, of the South Tredegar potteries. Farther along there was Fairmount, whose owner was a wealthy cotton-seed buyer; Rook Hill, which Tom remembered as the ancient roosting ground of the migratory winter crows; and Farnsworth Park, ruralizing the name of its builder. On the most commanding of the hillsides was a pile of rough-cut Tennessee marble with ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the sergeant, "my own idea of it is that K. O. was trying you out on purpose. And I'll wager the K. O. was glad to find a rook sentry so thoroughly alive to his job. Though I doubt if you'll get commended in orders for just being awake. But that reminds me of something that happened to me, in the Philippines," laughed Brimmer. "I was sergeant of the guard out there, and one night the colonel of another regiment ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... wait, and we shall see something fit to make us think. Far off on the clear gray sky appears a wavering speck which rises and falls and sways from side to side in an extraordinary way. Nearer and nearer the speck comes, until at last we find ourselves standing under a rook which flies with great difficulty. The poor rascal looks most disreputable, for his tail has evidently been shot away, and he is wounded. He drops on to a perch, but not before he has run the gauntlet of several lines of sharp eyes. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... characters and the visages of the visitants, it will be found it is most frequently attended by Turf-Jews and Greeks.{1} Any man indeed who dabbles in horse-dealing, must, like a gamester, be either a rook or a pigeon; {2} for horse-dealing is a species of gambling, in which ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... but I wouldn't hear of it; so she's at rest, an' so is old Molly Mallone. She wint away just two minutes be the clock before the pig, and wos buried the day afther. There's no more news as I knows of in the parish, except that your old flame Mary got married to Teddy O'Rook, an' they've been fightin' tooth an' nail ever since, as I towld ye they would long ago. No man could live wid that woman. But the schoolmaster, good man, has let me off the cow. Ye see, darlin', I towld him ye wos buildin' a palace in ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... chequered boards or other delineations, and persons of superior rank are in general versed in the game of chess, which they term main gajah, or the game of the elephant, naming the pieces as follows: king, raja; queen or vizir, mantri; bishop or elephant, gajah; knight or horse, kuda; castle, rook, or chariot, ter; and pawn or foot-soldier, bidak. For check they use the word sah; and for checkmate, mat or mati. Among these names the only one that appears to require observation as being peculiar is that for the castle or rook, which they have borrowed ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... with some hesitation, "I should like to know what happened when you first saw Mrs. Rook." To her surprise and relief, he at once complied with ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... manuscript letter of our poet's, written when employed on his "Summer," I transcribe his sentiments on his former literary friends in Scotland—he is writing to Mallet: "Far from defending these two lines, I damn them to the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, prepared of old for Mitchell, Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Wherever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably the perverse ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... I said, "as Guest here leaves me to do all the talking, I'll tell you why we are so far up to the northward, out of our usual beat. We heard in Samoa that a big ship, named the Sarawak had run ashore and been abandoned at Rook Island, in Dampier Straits, between the west end of New Britain and the east coast of New Guinea, and both Guest and myself know her to be one of the largest ships out of Liverpool; she left Sydney for Hongkong ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... itself into many little cataracts; and saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were grey, forget all the gratifications and all the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... accustomed to connect with the communication of an idea from one mind to another, can we deny that they have a language of their own, though it is one which in most cases we can neither speak nor understand? How can we say that a sentinel rook, when it sees a man with a gun and warns the other rooks by a concerted note which they all show that they understand by immediately taking flight, should not be credited both with reason and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... under his roof, the morning after my arrival, I first definitely felt that I had left the West behind me, when I found that a noise by which I had been just awakened, and which sounded like the cawing of a rook, was that of the muezzin borne from a neighboring minaret and requesting me to ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... example of a chess rook's path that is not re-entrant, but between two squares that are at the greatest possible distance from one another. For if it were desired to move, under the condition of visiting every square once and once only, from one corner square to the other ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... said than done. Clambering from rock to rook, always observant and watchful, the resolute youth pursued his way. Suddenly, however, he stood still, and threw himself flat on ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... that eye a-glintin' in the sunshine. I cou'd see 't from where I sot—an' so the birds thought. Well, wan arter another, they steps up an' flies off as ef hurried for time, when by-'m-by 'long comes an ould rook. ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Pigeon's, and the Wood-Pecker's. Of the nests of Rooks, it may be sufficient to observe, that they are often found to the number of six, or even more in a cluster. Crows' nests are always solitary; they are similar in structure to those of the rook. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... With flowery streams, the July feast befell, And there within the Chief-priest's fair abode They cast aside their trouble's heavy load, Scarce made aweary by the sultry day. The earth no longer laboured; shaded lay The sweet-breathed kine, across the sunny vale, From hill to hill the wandering rook did sail, Lazily croaking, midst his dreams of spring, Nor more awake the pink-foot dove did cling Unto the beech-bough, murmuring now and then; All rested but the restless sons of men And the great sun that wrought this happiness, And all the ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... no fear that we should lack for food. At its western end the valley narrowed into a canon. There was no choice of paths, for this was the sole outlet, and we were assured that we were on the right path by finding the King's symbol and the pointing arrow carved upon the rook. The canon descended very rapidly, and by noon we were so far below the level of the Mexican plateau that the air had a tropical warmth in it; and so warm was the night—for all the afternoon we continued to descend—that we had no need for blankets ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... to a rook's nest?" said a gentleman to a boy of seven years old; he looked very grave, and having pondered upon the question for some minutes, answered, "I do not know what you mean by the word go." Fortunately for the boy, the gentleman who asked the question, was not a captious ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... stories you have picked up about our country, and this river? We have plied here, men and boys, for years; and to be sure we cannot say that we never saw a swan: there are some here and there towards the fens, which make a low dull noise: but as for any harmony, a rook or a jackdaw, in comparison of them, may be looked upon ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... for the Black Earl scowled so at her that she feared to be silent. "If I said this thing, why should it vex the ear of so proud a knight? Yonder black rook did look into my face with an inquisitive eye as I plucked my herbs and harmed no man, so I, angry at the wicked one, cursed him begone. As he flew affrighted at my hand, I turned my eyes into my own heart. The birds and I, do we not both root in the cold earth, seeking to draw ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... to hold the attention of the royalists, and, besides that depletion, had to suffer the loss of many of his plainsmen who refused to accompany him across the Andes. But Colonel Rook, the head of the British Legion, assured Bolivar that he would follow him "beyond Cape Horn, if necessary." After spending a month painfully wading through the flooded plains, he ascended the Andes and crossed them, ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... the harsh and noisy Parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the Songster Family,—the Nightingales, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... fetch Makfadyane, Far northwast in a neuck; Be he the coronach[145] had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took: Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook.[146] The Devil sae deaved[147] was with their yell; That in the deepest pot of hell He ...
— English Satires • Various
... Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, Far north-wast in a neuck; Be he the coronach had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took. Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook. The Devil sae deaved was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smorit ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... to believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with physical conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. Our conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men to cut. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... somewhere now, among lone mountain rocks On Sipylus, where couch the nymphs at night Who dance all day by Achelous' stream, The once proud mother lies, herself a rook, And in cold breast broods o'er the goddess' wrong. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... diffused in the air.... It was the flush of dawn. All at once I was conscious of extreme fatigue and turned homewards. As I passed the poultry-yard, I heard the first morning cackling of the geese (no birds wake earlier than they do); along the roof at the end of each beam sat a rook, and they were all busily and silently pluming themselves, standing out in sharp outline against the milky sky. From time to time they all rose at once, and after a short flight, settled again in a row, without ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan. Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and falls ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... friendship must not interfere with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this cold-blooded gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and will rook their nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger? I hope I would go as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would not put on my hat to do a pleasure to society. I may starve my appetites and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall take me as ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Marshall County, Mississippi. Born during slavery. I b'long to Master John Rook. He died during the Civil War. Miss Patsy Rook raised me. I put on her shoes, made up her bed, fetched her ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... the morning after the attempt to seize the smugglers had been defeated by the instrumentality of Snarleyyow, upon the top of the immense fragment of the rook which we have described as lying upon the sea-edge of the platform was perched a fair, slight-made little girl, of about twelve years of age. She was simply clad in a short worsted petticoat and bodice of a dark colour; her head was bare, and her hair ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... manoeuvred. By the Nile all the tops of the palm-trees were crowded with daring riflemen, whose positions were indicated by the smoke-puffs of their rifles, or when some tiny black figure fell, like a shot rook, to the ground. In the foreground the gunboats, panting and puffing up the river, were surrounded on all sides by spouts and spurts of water, thrown up by the shells and bullets. Again the flotilla drew near the narrow channel; again the watching army ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... The Falcon and Tassel-gentle, The Laner and Laneret, The Bockerel and Bockeret, The Saker and Sacaret, The Merlin and Jack Merlin, The Hobby and Jack: There is the Stelletto of Spain, The Blood-red Rook from Turkey, The Waskite from Virginia: And there is of short-winged Hawks, The Eagle and Iron The Goshawk and Tarcel, The Sparhawk and Musket, The ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... beheld that familiar and illustrious face, how vulgar all of a sudden did Major Loder appear to her, and how that odious Captain Rook did smell of tobacco! In one instant she reassumed her fine-ladyship and tried to look and feel as if she were in May Fair once more. "That woman looks stupid and ill-humoured," she thought; "I am sure she can't amuse him. No, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by the expenditure of physical force. Anyone at all conversant with philosophical thought, if I may adopt a simile used by Mr. H. G. Wells, "would as soon think of trying to kill the square root of 2 with a rook rifle." Physical violence can only solve purely physical problems. But as man no longer exists, if he ever did exist, in the completely unsocial "state of nature,"[86] the relations of one individual with another are no longer purely physical: ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... in the knot-hole of the pollard elm—common eggs, but within each a speck that is not to be found in the cut diamond of two hundred carats—the dot of protoplasm, the atom of life. There was one row of pollards where they always began laying first. With a big stick in his beak the rook is blown aside like a loose feather in the wind; he knows his building-time from the fathers of his house—hereditary knowledge handed down in settled course: but the stray things of the hedge, how do they know? The great ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Squire had been nearly brought up to the point. It is painful to come to the conclusion, but Isabella's admirer, though a country gentlemen, was nothing of a sportsman, and rather a poor creature. When Mr. Pickwick and his followers were up early and out at the rook shooting, we find no Trundle. He was lying a-bed, no doubt. Stranger still, when the whole party went in for a day to Muggleton for the cricket match, Trundle was the only one who stayed behind. He remained with the ladies, for a purpose, no doubt; ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... are a very noisy lot; one would think they were trying to see who could speak the loudest. They tell us it is impossible to cross to the other side, as further inland the ridge ends—and there is nothing but bare broken rook—inaccessible all round. The majority of the men are bearded and moustached, and have cassowary feathers like a pad behind, on which they sit. They dress with a string. The demand for salt is very great; grains ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... leave you alone a single minute. God and Jesus stood beside the bed, and Jesus kept God in a good temper, and the Holy Ghost flew about the room and perched on the top of the linen cupboard, and bowed and bowed, and said, "Rook-ke-heroo-oo! Rook-ke-keroo-oo!" ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... brake; The mellow bullfinch answers from the grove: Nor are the linnets, o'er the flowering furze Poured out profusely, silent. Joined to these, Innumerous songsters, in the freshening shade Of new-sprung leaves, their modulations mix Mellifluous. The jay, the rook, the daw, And each harsh pipe, discordant heard alone, Aid the full concert: while the stock-dove breathes A melancholy murmur through the whole. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... Norsemen fled before the face of Even the Great. On this oak, whose leaves shine in the moon, the birds gather each night, the birds of the sea and the land, both of white and black feather. Among them is an old grey rook and a young crow. The birds sing such a beautiful song that the great sea keeps silence to hear it. All of them sing except the rook and the crow. Now the crow says: "Sing, little birds, sing; sing, little birds of the land, for when you die ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... then blew his horn, To let the neighbors know, This was Robin's wedding-day, And they might see the show. And first came parson Rook, With his spectacles and band, And one of Mother Hubbard's books He held within ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... blackbird, * lark, * yellowhammer, * robin, *wren, * golden-crested wren, * goldfinch, * chaffinch, * *greenfinch, pied wagtail, sparrow, * dunnock (hedge, accentor), missel thrush, starling, rook, jackdaw, *blackcap, * garden warbler, * willow warbler, * chiffchaff, * wood warbler, tree-creeper, * reed bunting, * sedge warbler, coot, water hen, little grebe (dabchick), tufted duck, wood pigeon, stock dove, * turtle dove, peewit, tit (? coal-tit), * cuckoo, * nightjar, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... may, the heart of the man and the fancy of the poet are the two grand considerations for which I live: if miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the best part of the functions of my soul immortal, I had better been a rook or a magpie at once, and then I should not have been plagued with any ideas superior to breaking of clods and picking up grubs; not to mention barn-door cocks of mallards, creatures with which I could almost ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... that, some time ago—I can't say when exactly, but it was before I came down here—this unnatural son introduced to the parental abode (which I think is either No. 5 or No. 6 in a row of young chestnuts abutting on the high road) a rook of more than dubious reputation, whom he persuaded his unsuspecting sire to put up for the night. And there the rook has been ever since. As I said, I have neither heard nor seen him, but I'm positive he's there. I am unable to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... learned? An expedition against Mexico, an attack upon the dominions of the King of Spain with whom we are at peace? Or a revolution in the country west of the Ohio? The one's a misdemeanour; the other's treason." He moved a rook. "Most like 'twas both—the first to mask the second. The boldest, simplest, most comprehensive stroke; there, there would show the mind ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... notes; drank a pint of port apiece; and under its influence became boastful. Insensibly the adventure of the beaver hat came to wear the aspect of a dashing practical joke. It encouraged us to exchange confidences of earlier deeds of derring-do, of bird-nesting, of rook-shooting, of angling for trout, of encounters with poachers. I remember crossing my knees, holding up my glass to the light, and remarking sagely that some poachers were not at all bad fellows. Hartnoll agreed that it depended how you took 'em. ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... beginning of March, coming back from a long walk on the hills, I heard the bleat of the lamb and the impatient cawing of the rook that could not put its nest together in the windy branches, and as I stopped to listen it seemed to me that something passed by in the dusk: the spring-tide itself seemed to be fleeting across the tillage towards the scant fields. As the spring-tide ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... before a large shaded lawn, where a number of white men and women were playing a game with cards. The cards used by the lawn party were not ordinary playing-cards, but had figures on them instead of spots, and were called "rook" cards. The party of white ladies and gentlemen were playing "rook." On a table in the middle of the lawn glittered some pieces of silver plate which formed the first, second, and third prizes for the three ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... such a wager. But he, my lord, who has the patience and prudence never to venture beyond small game, such as, at most, might crack the Christmas-box of a grocer's 'prentice, who vies with those that have little to hazard, and who therefore, having the larger stock, can always rook them by waiting for his good fortune, and by rising from the game when luck leaves him—such a one as he, my lord, I do not call a great gamester, to whatever other name he ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he DID die. Mortification set in, and they had to amputate him. But ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... do you manage to live?" "Well, aw can hardly tell,—aw'll be sunken iv aw can tell. It's very thin pikein'; but very little does for me, an' aw've nought but mysel'. Yo see'n, aw get a bit ov a job neaw an' then, an' a scrat amung th' rook, like an owd hen. But aw'll tell yo one thing; aw'll not go up yon, iv aw can help it,—aw'll not." ("Up yon" meant to the Board of Guardians.) "Eh, now," said the woman of the house, "aw never see'd sich a man as ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... continent must have been concentrated on this island. Indeed, I doubt if a sweeping together of all the birds of the United States into any two of the largest States would people the earth and air more fully. There appeared to be a plover, a crow, a rook, a blackbird, and a sparrow to every square yard of ground. They know the value of birds in Britain,—that they are the friends, not the enemies, of the farmer. It must be the paradise of crows ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... young days, sir," explained Mr. Shrig with his placid smile, "I vere a champion buzman, ah! and a prime rook at queering the gulls, too, but I ewentually turned honest all along of a flash, morning-sneak covess as got ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... husbands' fate, And orphans for their parents' timeless death,— Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born. The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, And chatt'ring pies in dismal discord sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope, An indigested and deformed lump, Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born, To signify ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... these attendants. After feeding, the uncovered craw protrudes; at such times, and indeed generally, the Carrancha is an inactive, tame, and cowardly bird. Its flight is heavy and slow, like that of an English rook. It seldom soars; but I have twice seen one at a great height gliding through the air with much ease. It runs (in contradistinction to hopping), but not quite so quickly as some of its congeners. At times the Carrancha is noisy, but is not generally so: its cry ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... door. Three other little girls looked on in open-mouthed appreciation. I do not wish to shock you, so I will not tell you about the complete success of the booby-trap, nor of the bloodthirsty fight between Lucy and Bertha Kaurter in a secluded fives-court during rec. Dora Spielman and Gertrude Rook were agitated seconds. It was Lucy's form mistress, the adored Miss Harter Larke, who interrupted the fight at the fifth round, and led the blood-stained culprits into the hall and up the beautiful picture-like steps to the ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... led down to the river. Yes, there were several rabbits out. With the white marguerites and the dew cobwebs, it was all moon-flowery and white; and the rabbits being there made it perfect. He wanted one badly to model from, and for a moment was tempted to get his rook rifle—but what was the good of a dead rabbit—besides, they looked so happy! He put the glasses down and went towards his greenhouse to get a drawing block, thinking to sit on the wall and make a sort of Midsummer Night's Dream sketch of flowers and rabbits. Someone was there, bending down and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... lay hold of him; Bear him to the rook Tarpeian, and from thence Into destruction ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... their habits, the ladies of the family grew weary of them and wished to remove them. Accordingly, the colony was driven away, and made their present settlement in a grove behind the house. Ever since that time not a rook has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put together. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one stiff, and speaking by rote, or talking politics. How glad I used to be to get on horseback again! But to see these—why, it is like the shepherd's glimpse at the pixies!—as one reads a new book, or watches what one only half understands—a rook's parliament, or a gathering of sea-fowl ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of sense, and keep the heart Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes 'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good, 65 That we may lift the soul, and contemplate With lively joy the joys we cannot share. My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook Beat its straight path along the dusky air Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing 70 (Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light) Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory, While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still, Flew creeking ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... into Europe from Persia shortly after the sixth century of our era. In its earliest Asiatic form styled the Chaturanga, It was adapted for four persons, having four small armies of eight each. King, three pieces answering to our Rook, Bishop, and Knight, Elephant (Chariot or Ship,) and Horse, with four Pawns. The players decided what piece to move by the ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... less than an hour, we found the horses tethered among the bushes. House there was none, which must be inconvenient when the weather is too tempestuous for crossing the strait from Parao. We took shelter from the heat under a rook, making studies of a group of picturesque shepherds, and amusing ourselves with some luscious grapes,—baskets of which were waiting for the return of the passage-boat to La Madelena,—while a pack-horse was loaded with ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... verdant, springing up fresh between the old, and giving a tone to the rest as you look down into the bunches. Some blades are nearly grey, some the palest green, and among them others, torn from the roots perhaps by rooks searching for grubs, are quite white. The very track of a rook through the grass leaves a different shade each side, as the blades ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... fully occupied. Hugh seemed to have totally changed; he no longer absented himself from the family on mysterious errands; he went to church regularly, and appeared to take pleasure in the frequent calls of Mr. Rook, the minister. The neighbors began to say that there never was a more dutiful son or a more attentive and affectionate brother. Some half suspected the reason of the reformation,—no one so quick as Squire Clamp, who had reasons of his own, as the reader knows, for wishing delay. After a few ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... she had passed; he didn't know why, for there was nothing in it, after all. No, Joe, nothing in it—it was in you; that makes all the difference. And the voice whispered to him of sunny days in the bright fields, when he held the plough, and the sly old rook would come bobbing and pecking behind him; and the little field-mouse would flit away from its turned up nest, frightened to death, as if it were smitten with an earthquake; and the skylark would ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... nature, counsel men. Different notes as rook from wren Hear we when our steps begin, And the choice is cast within, Where a robber raven's tale ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... occasions, she packed up a bundle of articles, crept down again, and went out of the house. She had a place of refuge in these cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been. This place was Rook's Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery's part when that young woman was particularly in ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... was my chessboard with my letters on it. I tried reading them downward, across, upward and diagonally, in the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... (as is their custom, which makes 'em so Hated by Foreigners), kept themselves very much to themselves, and my Lord Duke of Tantivy's party, with the exception of the Marquis of Newmarket, who was good enough to Borrow a score of gold pieces from us, and to Rook us at cards now and then, took not the slightest notice of my poor little Master, who was dying to be introduced into Polite Society, and spread abroad those fictions of his cousinage to Lady Betty Heeltap and my Lord Poddle everywhere he went; but the French ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... widgen me, rook me, fop me! Yfaith, yfaith, they are too short for me. Knaves and fools meet when purses go: Wise men look to their purses ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... been built with a view to holding objects of great value. It had all the qualities of a royal treasury. The inscription on the wall spoke of it as "the treasure-house of Aton." That no ancient plunderer had entered this chamber, which the heretic King had cut out of the rook under the hills behind his city, was obvious. There had been practically no excavating to be done, in the sense in which Margaret thought of excavating, because the chambers were all in a state of perfect preservation; none of them were blocked up with rubbish. Once ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... crow still nests on the moor, although the eggs are taken every season. But the old birds are very wary, and manage to keep out of shot. The common rook, however, of late years, has got a bad name, as having taken up the marauding habits of the genuine crow. Owing to the improved cultivation of land, there is not now the supply of grubs on which the ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... time came, how kind they all were! indeed, though it was a busy season with every bird, each anxious to finish its work, yet I heard an old Rook one day ask little Jenny Wren 'if he should help her,' as he met her trying to drag a large wisp of straw with all ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... adversary a moment's freedom to escape and then pounces upon him with the soft-furred claws; assured of his superiority in the game, yet using only half his mind; fencing with one arm pinioned; chess-playing with a rook and pawn given to his antagonist; or shall we say chess-playing blindfold and seeing every piece upon the board? Is Bishop Blougram's Apology a poem at all? some literary critics may ask. And the answer is that through it we make acquaintance with one of Browning's most genial ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... see vols. v. 122; vi. 16-49. I may remind the reader that the O. Egyptian "Rokh," or "Rukh," by some written "Rekhit," whose ideograph is a monstrous bird with one claw raised, also denotes pure wise Spirits, the Magi, &c. I know a man who derives from it our "rook" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... in the least, mamma, thank you," said Fred, sitting up vigorously; "you do not know how strong I am growing." And then turning to the window, he made an effort, and began observing on her rook's nest, as she called it, and her lilac buds. Then came a few more cheerful questions and comments on the late notes, and then Mrs. Frederick Langford proposed that the reading of the service ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... two Knights, and two Bishops. The eight men in front are called Pawns. At the beginning of the game the queen always stands upon a square of her own colour. The board is so set that each player has a white square at the right hand end of the row nearest to him. The rook, knight and bishop on the right of the king are known as King's rook, King's knight, and King's bishop; the other three as Queen's rook, Queen's knight, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... "Raw Recruit," The joke of the awkward squad, The rook of the rookies to boot, And a bumpkin, a dolt and a clod; But this much I'll plead in defense I seem popular with these chaps, For they keep me a'moving thither and ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... to the Horse Show, which she drove to with Mrs. Mannering in a hired fly. I don't call it very polite to the hostess, do you? This afternoon she amused herself from her bedroom window by shooting at rabbits just beyond the wire fence of the lawn with a rook rifle; she did not hit any rabbits, but she got a gardener in the leg, and the man was very angry, and bled a great deal, and had to be taken away, and I think it was very careless ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... Duke of Somerset—rest his soul—would have had us wedded. On the love day, when all walked together to St. Paul's, and the King hoped all was peace, we spoke our vows to one another in the garden of Westminster. She gave me this rook, I gave her the jewel of my cap; I read her true love in her eyes, like our limpid northern brooks. Oh! she was fair, fairer than yonder star in the sunset, but her father, the Lord Audley, was absent, and we could go ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in Prather's Mill Road burned the slow fires that kept the Government officials in Atlanta at a white heat. They were burning now. If one of the officials could have crawled to the edge of the gorge, where everything seemed dwarfed by the towering walls of rook and the black abyss from which they sprang, he would have seen small fitful sparks of flame glowing at intervals upon the bosom of the deeper and blacker night below. These were the fires that all the power and ingenuity of the Government failed to smother, but they were ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... moves before, or at the time that an unforeseen reply takes your Queen. No chess-player sleeps well. After the painful strategy of the day one fights one's battles over again. You see with more than daylight clearness that it was the Rook you should have moved, and not the Knight. No! it is impossible! no common sinner innocent of chess knows these lower deeps of remorse. Vast desert boards lie for the chess-player beyond the gates of horn. Stalwart Rooks ram headlong at one, Knights hop sidelong, one's Pawns are ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... as she had often done on lesser occasions, she packed up a bundle of articles, crept down again, and went out of the house. She had a place of refuge in these cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been. This place was Rook's Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery's part when that young woman was particularly ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... and shelves, But ourselves, That rook and rise With endless and uneasy motion, Now touching the very skies, Now sinking into the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... teaching me to play at chess, which game he understood something of. I made an attempt, though almost against my inclination, and after several efforts, having learned the march, my progress was so rapid, that before the end of the first sitting I gave him the rook, which in the beginning he had given me. Nothing more was necessary; behold me fascinated with chess! I buy a board, with the rest of the apparatus, and shutting myself up in my chamber, pass whole days and nights in studying ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... argue. "How could you go rook-shooting? You know you scream when a gun goes off; and besides, you're afraid of ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... we come to bigger birds—ducks and puffins. Puffins have beaks like poll parrots, and are about the size of a rook; they have neat white shirt-fronts, and their beaks are red and yellow and blue, but they have silly faces, as if they thought of nothing but their own fine clothes. They live near water on cliffs, and sometimes use an old rabbit burrow ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... I saw the cold and rook delighting Heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild, that every casual thought of that and this Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season With the hot blood of youth, of love ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... friend and I,' replied the host, 'are going out rook-shooting before breakfast. He's a very ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... his head against a wall like a hooded rook as he was. So giddy had he become at the sight of this creature, even more enticing than a siren rising from the water. He noticed the animals carved over the door and returned to the house of the archbishop with his head full of diabolical ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... forced smile, and took up the spare gun with an expression of countenance which a metaphysical rook, impressed with a foreboding of his approaching death by violence, may be supposed to assume. It might have been keenness, but it looked remarkably like misery. The old gentleman nodded; and two ragged ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... attachment to locality that since the incident alluded to in the following Poem took place the Rooks have, many of them, built in fir trees at a little distance from their former habitation. The habits of the Rook are well worthy the attention of all who delight in the study of ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... members amused themselves with chasing each other through endless mazes, and in their flight they made the air sound with an infinitude of discordant noises. In the midst of these playful exertions it unfortunately happened that one rook, by a sudden turn, struck his beak against the wing of another. The sufferer instantly fell into the river. A general cry of distress ensued. The birds hovered with every expression of anxiety ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... Different notes as rook from wren Hear we when our steps begin, And the choice is cast within, Where a robber raven's tale ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cataracts; and saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were grey, forget all the gratifications and all the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... again strange!" T'an Ch'un exclaimed. "Instead of bracing up your energies now to rook some money out of our venerable senior, you turn ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... holes averaging some thirty feet—which was a style of hard work I didn't quite admire; so hearing of the greater facility of the Alexander diggings, I went through Bully Rook Forest, and tried my luck in the Jim Crow Ranges. This paid well; and I bought a dray, and bring up goods to the stores, which I find easier work, and twice as profitable as digging. There's my story; and little I thought when I ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... grope my way into the dense part of the wood and sit down in the dark. It was more sheltered there, too. How quiet the earth and air seemed now! The cold is beginning, there is rime on the ground; now and again a stalk of grass creaks faintly, a little mouse squeaks, a rook comes soaring over the treetops, then all is quiet again. Was there ever such fair hair as hers? Surely never. Born a wonder, from top to toe, her lips a ripened loveliness, and the play of dragonflies in her hair. If only one could draw out a diadem from a sack of clothes ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... Coomber, as two or three married men pressed forward; "them as has got wives ain't no call to go on such a trip as this. There'll be enough of us; there's me and Bob, and Rook and White came with us a ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... Wood-Pecker's. Of the nests of Rooks, it may be sufficient to observe, that they are often found to the number of six, or even more in a cluster. Crows' nests are always solitary; they are similar in structure to those of the rook. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... At the whole frisk and gambol. At the wolf's tail. At battabum, or riding of the At bum to buss, or nose in breech. wild mare. At Geordie, give me my lance. At Hind the ploughman. At swaggy, waggy or shoggyshou. At the good mawkin. At stook and rook, shear and At the dead beast. threave. At climb the ladder, Billy. At the birch. At the dying hog. At the muss. At the salt doup. At the dilly dilly darling. At the pretty pigeon. At ox moudy. At barley break. At purpose ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... me on a bow so small, The rook could build her nest no higher; They fix'd me on the trembling ball That crowns the steeple's quiv'ring spire; They set me where the seas retire, But drown with their returning tide; And made me flee the mountain's fire, When rolling from ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... but a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me sailed five herring gulls, high ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;—and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of the calm satisfaction ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... they slept well that night; after such unusual excitement it was hardly to be expected they would. But Griselda, being a little girl and not a rook, was so tired that two minutes after she had tucked herself up in bed she was quite sound asleep, and did not wake for ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... roof, the morning after my arrival, I first definitely felt that I had left the West behind me, when I found that a noise by which I had been just awakened, and which sounded like the cawing of a rook, was that of the muezzin borne from a neighboring minaret and requesting ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... return and visit them, or pass that way again. So the account by Dr. Washburn of platoons of dogs coming in turn, and peaceably, to feed on a dead donkey in the streets of Constantinople, would seem to be most naturally explained by some dim recognition of rights. Rook communities have not received the attention and investigation which they deserve, but their actions are certainly worthy of attention. Concerning the sense of ownership in dogs and other mammals opinions ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... bring forth thy priests, Al Kahlminar, then would I confront them and thee with the two elephants which my brother sent me lately from Geestan, on each of which I can place a rook with a slave cunning with the javelin, before which thy priests will flee; for the animals see no difference between priests and other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... She wint away just two minutes be the clock before the pig, and wos buried the day afther. There's no more news as I knows of in the parish, except that your old flame Mary got married to Teddy O'Rook, an' they've been fightin' tooth an' nail ever since, as I towld ye they would long ago. No man could live wid that woman. But the schoolmaster, good man, has let me off the cow. Ye see, darlin', I towld ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... at sight o' the scarecrow. For et didn' seem like no ord'nary scarecrow, sir, wi' that eye a-glintin' in the sunshine. I cou'd see 't from where I sot—an' so the birds thought. Well, wan arter another, they steps up an' flies off as ef hurried for time, when by-'m-by 'long comes an ould rook. ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania. Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and the region of ineffectuality and incompleteness. The only cultivators here, and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are the rook and mole: and yet the land is rich enough—the fat deep crumbling of the shale and ironstone returning year by year into the mud, from whence it hardened ages since. There are scores of farms of far worse land in mid-England, under 'a four-course shift,' yielding their load of wheat an acre. When ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... died away in the echoes of the cloisters, but of other answer there was none. At that instant a rook, no doubt one of the birds he had disturbed, came diving down, and flapped its wings across the burial-ground. The sight of something, moving there, almost startled Charles out of his senses, and the matter was not much mended when he discovered it was only a bird. He turned, and flew ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the Chief-priest's fair abode They cast aside their trouble's heavy load, Scarce made aweary by the sultry day. The earth no longer laboured; shaded lay The sweet-breathed kine, across the sunny vale, From hill to hill the wandering rook did sail, Lazily croaking, midst his dreams of spring, Nor more awake the pink-foot dove did cling Unto the beech-bough, murmuring now and then; All rested but the restless sons of men And the great sun that wrought this happiness, And all the vale with fruitful hopes did bless. So in a marble chamber ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... about like nine-pins—at once included in the education of "Izunsabe," which he took upon himself, a course of elemental doctrine in the one true game. And the boy fought his way up at such a pace that he jumped from odds of queen and rook to pawn and two moves in less than two years. And now he could almost give odds to his tutor, though he never presumed to offer them; and trading as he did with enlightened merchants of large Continental sea-ports, who ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of an amorous rook. Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike us as the thin music ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... gone to his rest, but his name remains green among the villagers. To-day the traveler can see his elevated grave at Tigme[a]rook, about six miles east of the village of Tigara, at which place his career came to a sudden end through the agency of an arrow driven by ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... unfamiliar to contemporary novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the legitimate boundaries ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... bearded man, with grave, but gentle look— His silence sweet with sounds With which the simple-hearted Spring abounds: Lowing of cattle from the abbey grounds, Chirping of insect, and the building rook, Mingled like murmurs of a dreaming shell; Quaint tracery of bird and branch and brook Flitting across the pages of his book, Until the very words a freshness took— Deep in his cell, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "See, now, bully rook, if I take you," he said. "It behooves you to have fair inductance at court. For this ye come to Sir Percevall Hart, her Majesty's harbinger and—though he says so himself—a good friend to Cecil. Now, mark me, lad. Naught do I know or care of thy 'funny craft' or 'bicycle.' Master ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... had had enough of garrison duty, even could I have got back my commission, which was not very likely. So I put soldiering out of the question; and yet, when I had done so, I was infernally puzzled to think of any thing better. I had no fancy to turn rook, and rove from place to place in search of pigeons—no uncommon resource with younger brothers of an idle turn and exhausted means. I had fallen in with a few birds of that breed, and had come to the conclusion that to save ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... a steam-boiler or something burst under the sidewalk and broke his leg? The first thing old Backbite said when he heard of it was, 'H'm! been drinking, I suppose.' Now here's Billings with a despatch. What is it, bully rook?" he hailed, as the adjutant came ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... while sitting on their nests. These birds in the breeding season assemble together and make their nests on tall firs or oak trees; sometimes they build on rocks near the sea coast. It is said, too, that they will occasionally build on the ground. The heron's nest is not unlike that of the rook, only larger and broader; it is made of sticks and lined with wool and coarse grass; the female lays four or five eggs of a green colour, her long legs are tucked under her. Rooks and jackdaws sometimes take up their quarters ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... in parties of two or three. East, still doing the cicerone, pointed out all the remarkable characters to Tom as they passed: Osbert, who could throw a cricket-ball from the little-side ground over the rook-trees to the Doctor's wall; Gray, who had got the Balliol scholarship, and, what East evidently thought of much more importance, a half-holiday for the School by his success; Thorne, who had run ten miles in two ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... Jervis himself—seventy, last birthday. Next, his unmarried sister—nearly eighty. Next, his man-servant, Mr. Rook—well past sixty. And last, his man-servant's wife, who considers herself young, being only a little over forty. That is the household. Mrs. Rook is coming to-day to attend Emily on the journey to the North; and I am not at all sure that Emily will ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... bearer of any gossip that might be available, and seldom failed to provide his master with a stimulant and irritant. On the morning following on Christian's return it was very evident that intelligence of unusual greatness seethed in the cauldron wherein fermented Mr. Evans' brew of news. His rook-like eye sparkled, his movements, even that walk for whose disabilities it may be remembered that the pantry boy had thanked his God, were alert ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... "Mr. Rook, the stationer. It was talked of up and down High Street, he assures me. We may laugh, but this kind of misrepresentation goes ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... their peculiar utterance. Or, take as an example the web-footed family: Do not all the geese and the innumerable host of ducks quack? Does not every member of the crow family caw, whether it be the jackdaw, the jay, or the magpie, the rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the songster family—the nightingales, the thrushes, the mocking-birds, the robins; they ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Bray are as well known and distinguished as the negroes are from white men. And this unhappy jest has been carried so far that our people have often sallied out in arms against their scoffers, and given them battle: neither king nor rook, nor fear nor shame, being able to restrain them. Tomorrow, I believe, or next day, those of our town will take the field against the people of another village about two leagues from us, being one of those which persecute us most: and ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the cheap classics in the book-case were a sign of an effort in that direction. The only object that threw any light upon the character of the room's owner was a large perch, placed in the window to catch the air and sun, upon which a tame and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side. The bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham's shoulder. He lit his gas-fire and settled down in gloomy patience to await his dinner. After sitting thus for some minutes a ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the summer home of the Stanleys, and The Dell, owned, and inhabited at intervals, by Mr. Young-Dickson, of the South Tredegar potteries. Farther along there was Fairmount, whose owner was a wealthy cotton-seed buyer; Rook Hill, which Tom remembered as the ancient roosting ground of the migratory winter crows; and Farnsworth Park, ruralizing the name of its builder. On the most commanding of the hillsides was a pile of ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... St. Castin—speedily arrive in the Colony.' That throws light upon the mystery, Cadet! A woman was to have an interview with Caroline at midnight! Good God, Cadet! not two hours before we arrived! And we deferred starting in order that we might rook the Signeur de Port Neuf! Too late! too late! Oh cursed word that ever seals our fate when we propose a good deed!" and Bigot felt himself a man ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... indeed (as is their custom, which makes 'em so Hated by Foreigners), kept themselves very much to themselves, and my Lord Duke of Tantivy's party, with the exception of the Marquis of Newmarket, who was good enough to Borrow a score of gold pieces from us, and to Rook us at cards now and then, took not the slightest notice of my poor little Master, who was dying to be introduced into Polite Society, and spread abroad those fictions of his cousinage to Lady Betty Heeltap and my Lord Poddle everywhere he went; but the French and German Magnificoes were less ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... a big spring-trap, and us in it,' she said slowly. Then she sprang up feverishly. 'Let's practise till we're as hoarse as a young rook!' she cried. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... the face of Even the Great. On this oak, whose leaves shine in the moon, the birds gather each night, the birds of the sea and the land, both of white and black feather. Among them is an old grey rook and a young crow. The birds sing such a beautiful song that the great sea keeps silence to hear it. All of them sing except the rook and the crow. Now the crow says: "Sing, little birds, sing; sing, little birds of the land, for when you die you will at ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... controversy still rages. These are: (a) how Greek utilized the four sibilants (Shin, Samech, Zain and Zade), which it rook over from the Phoenician; (b) what was the history of development in the symbols for f, ch, ps, o (the history of x belongs to both heads); (c) the history of the symbol for the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... eats rook-pie, and cares for nothing else but a sound digestion. The spiritualist also eats rook-pie, but after the repast he will sentimentalise over dead rooks, without losing his belief in an all-merciful Providence. He will assure you, indeed, and try to convince you, that the shooting of rooks ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... woman could be killed by the weapon that might be offered me. I was pretty cool-headed in relation to such practical aspects of my affair. I had some little difficulty in finding a gunsmith. In Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth in a cycle shop, but the only revolvers these people had impressed me as being too small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop window in the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice, a reasonably ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... think. Far off on the clear gray sky appears a wavering speck which rises and falls and sways from side to side in an extraordinary way. Nearer and nearer the speck comes, until at last we find ourselves standing under a rook which flies with great difficulty. The poor rascal looks most disreputable, for his tail has evidently been shot away, and he is wounded. He drops on to a perch, but not before he has run the gauntlet of several lines of sharp eyes. The poor bird sits on his branch swinging weakly to and fro, humping ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he DID die. Mortification set in, and they had to amputate ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... up fresh between the old, and giving a tone to the rest as you look down into the bunches. Some blades are nearly grey, some the palest green, and among them others, torn from the roots perhaps by rooks searching for grubs, are quite white. The very track of a rook through the grass leaves a different shade each side, as the blades ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... acceptable boon. 30 Ere yet the Sun through the bright Ram has urged His steepy course, or mother Earth unbound Her frozen bosom to the western gale; When feathered troops, their social leagues dissolved, Select their mates, and on the leafless elm The noisy rook builds high her wicker nest; Mark well the wanton females of thy pack, That curl their taper tails, and frisking court Their pyebald mates enamoured; their red eyes Flash fires impure; nor rest, nor food they take, 40 Goaded by furious love. In separate cells Confine them ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... And orphans for their parents' timeless death,— Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born. The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, And chatt'ring pies in dismal discord sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope, An indigested and deformed lump, Not ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... and Jesus and the Holy Ghost. They didn't leave you alone a single minute. God and Jesus stood beside the bed, and Jesus kept God in a good temper, and the Holy Ghost flew about the room and perched on the top of the linen cupboard, and bowed and bowed, and said, "Rook-ke-heroo-oo! Rook-ke-keroo-oo!" ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... revolving pistols. These were all new; but there were in addition two or three second-hand double-barrelled guns for the use of his servants, in case of necessity, and three light rifles of the sort used for rook-shooting. Altogether, it was quite an armoury. The carbines were in neat cases; and the boys carried these and a box of cartridges, while Mr. Hardy took his rifle; and so they started off ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... to stand in the stable and my coat was brushed every day till it shone like a rook's wing. It was early in May, when there came a man from Squire Gordon's, who took me away to the hall. My master said, "Good-by, Darkie; be a good horse, and always do your best." I could not say "good-by", so I put my nose into his hand; ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... family cares, feeding the little ones, and teaching them to fly, there is not much time for singing. It is said that every bird has a different note or call. I wonder how many you know? I fancy I can guess: the cock, the rook, the swallow, the thrush, the blackbird, the lark; if you do not know the notes or calls of all these, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... plied here, men and boys, for years; and to be sure we cannot say that we never saw a swan: there are some here and there towards the fens, which make a low dull noise: but as for any harmony, a rook or a jackdaw, in comparison of them, may be looked ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... with a knife. There are a number of non-analytical people who would be quite prepared to believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with physical conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. One's conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental movement, then when you have thought ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... Check! Dinas, check and mate! Thou mad'st it easy, friend. Thou never shouldst Have sacrificed the knight, for thus my rook ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... The building-rook'll caw from the windy tall elm-tree, And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea, And the swallow'll come back again with summer o'er the wave, But I shall lie alone, mother, within the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... distance, when our smoke-sail yard was manned; we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose in the midst of us. "Doey, get beyond me, zur; doey, Mr Rattlin," he would say. "Ah! zur, I'd climb with any bragger in this ship for a rook's nest, where I ha' got a safe bough to stand upon; but to dance upon this here see-sawing line, and to call it a horse, too, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... done. Clambering from rock to rook, always observant and watchful, the resolute youth pursued his way. Suddenly, however, he stood still, and threw himself flat on ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Mr. Wardle took Winkle rook-shooting. The pair set out with their guns, preceded by the fat boy and followed by Mr. Pickwick, Snodgrass and the corpulent Tupman. Winkle, who disliked to admit his ignorance of guns, showed it in a painful way. His first shot missed the birds, and lodged itself ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... house shortly before a death takes place in it, because their highly developed psychic faculty of scent enables them to detect the advent of the phantom of death, of which they have the greatest horror. A rook is of great service, when investigating haunted houses, as it nearly always gives warning of the appearance of the Unknown by violent flappings of the wings, loud croaking, and other unmistakable ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... you!" He put out a hand, and I took it. "I crawled up a drain," he said. "But they didn't kill everyone. And after they went away I got off towards Walton across the fields. But—— It's not sixteen days altogether—and your hair is grey." He looked over his shoulder suddenly. "Only a rook," he said. "One gets to know that birds have shadows these days. This is a bit open. Let us crawl under those bushes ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... King and Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke. Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook necessary of existence. Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... comfortably," the grasshopper says, "but I am in fear of being pounced upon by a hungry bird. What bird have I most reason to fear?" The ants answer: The rook, the lark, the ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... setting-dogs, they that draw in bubbles for old gamesters to rook; also a sergeant's yeoman, or bailiff's follower; also ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... Miss Betsey. 'David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the Cardinal's garden. The King had led her by the hand. There had been a great crying out of many people of the lower sort that crowded the terrace before the garden. Now the rain fell, and all was desolation. A yeoman in brown fustian ran bending his head before the tempestuous rain. A rook, blown impotently backwards, essayed slowly to cross towards the western trees. Her eyes followed him until a great gust blew him in a wider curve, backwards and up, and when again he steadied himself he was no more than a blot on the wet ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... called the canal. When his feet slipped and he fell in, his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does any one sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all his life: he was dead, and that is all. As for granny, she felt no twinge: she had ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... blew his horn, To let the neighbors know, This was Robin's wedding-day, And they might see the show. And first came parson Rook, With his spectacles and band, And one of Mother Hubbard's books ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... ingenuity To discover the secret of this noble game. Let them learn the name of every piece. Its proper position, and what is its movement. Let them make out the foot-soldier of the army, The elephant, the rook, and the horseman, The march of the vizier and the procession of the King. If they discover the science of this noble game, They will have surpassed the most able in science. Then the tribute and taxes which the King hath demanded I will cheerfully ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... p. 626.). I know not what has led to the supposition that this name denotes the magpie. It may possibly be traced to the same root as that of a cognate species, the cornix frugivora; Roeck, Germ., according to Gesner; Friesic, roek; Ang.-S. hroc, the rook: but I am at a loss to discover anything similar in old French to explain the occurrence of the termination, which seems to be a popular or familiar diminutive, a Gallicism, analogous ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... you! Did I say the 'root' had been striking then, or rather, that the seeds, whence the roots take leisure and grow, they had been planted then—and might not a good heart and hand drop acorns enough to grow up into a complete Dodona-grove,—when the very rook, say farmers, hides and forgets whole navies of ship-wood one day to be, in his summer storing-journeys? But this shall do—I am not going to prove what may be, when here it is, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... (gambler),' says the writer before quoted, 'take up a young fellow in a tavern upon this very bet. The bargain was made that the rook should have seven always, and the young gentleman six, and throw continually. To play they went; the rook won the first day L10, and the next day the like sum; and so for six days together, in all ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... hope that cruel old Mentor is not coming to tumble us down over a great rook, like Telemaque in ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tree, I hear the purling brook, And from the old manse on the lea Flies slow the cawing crow— (In England 'twere a rook!) ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... dark bright eyes of the little Jan first came to be of tender interest with Mrs. Lake, she fully hoped, and constantly prophesied, that he would be "as black as a rook;" a style of complexion to which she gave a distinct preference, though the miller was fair by nature as well as white by trade. Jan's ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... autumnal foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird's-nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them too; for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in the faith of his ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... watched a rook pursuing a swift and making every effort to overtake and strike it. The rook displayed great power of wing, twisting and turning, now descending or turning on one side to glide more rapidly, and uttering short 'caws' of eagerness or anger; but, just eluding the heavy rush ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... butter; and he does not recollect that a ploughman's mind wants to lie fallow a little, and can't give a crop every year. It is hard to make rope when your hemp is all used up, or pancakes without batter, or rook pie without the birds; and so I found it hard to write more when I had said just about all I knew. Giving much to the poor doth increase a man's store, but it is not the same with writing; at least, I am such a poor scribe that I don't find it come because ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the unusual rate of speed over the very rough rails was excessive; it was, however, consolatory to feel that any little unpleasantness which might occur through the fact of the car leaving the track would be attended with some sense of alleviation. The rook is said to have thought he was paying dear for good company when he was put into the pigeon pie, but it by no means follows that a leap from an embankment, or an upset into a river, would be as disastrous as is usually supposed, if taken ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... schooner-rigged ship, helped him to embark them and sail them in the bath to foreign parts, trapped a squirrel and let it go again, allowed him to make havoc of his possessions, fired at bottles with his revolver for the boy's delectation, shot a crow or two with a rook-rifle, played an improvised game of fives with a tennis-ball, told him tales, and generally gave up the day to his amusement. What he did not do was to repeat the experiment of a year ago, or make any kind of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... you've been grumbling and growling ever since we left Rangoon, and have made difficulties innumerable where you needn't have done so, and now, because you think the affair is going to turn out badly, you round upon me as if it were all a put-up job on my part, to rook you of your money. It's not the thing, Hayle, and I don't mind saying that I ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... by the table with a small rook-rifle in her hands. The breech was open. She looked down the barrel, holding up the weapon so that the light might shine ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... whether for the sake of the pun, or because he disliked music, is uncertain. He invited, for the love of punning, Mr. Crowe and Mr. Rooke to dine with him; and having given Mr. Birdmore, another guest, a hint to be rather after the time, on his appearing, said, "Mr. Rook! Mr. Crowe! I beg leave to introduce one Bird more." He married his niece to a gentleman of the hopeful name of Buckle. The enterprise succeeded beyond his expectation. Mrs. Buckle was delivered of twins. "A pair of Buckles!" "Boys ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... protested Sir Ralph. "I have roared with laughter at his last play. Never did any one so hit the follies of town and country. His rural Put is perfection; his London rook is to ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... in general versed in the game of chess, which they term main gajah, or the game of the elephant, naming the pieces as follows: king, raja; queen or vizir, mantri; bishop or elephant, gajah; knight or horse, kuda; castle, rook, or chariot, ter; and pawn or foot-soldier, bidak. For check they use the word sah; and for checkmate, mat or mati. Among these names the only one that appears to require observation as being peculiar is that for the castle or rook, which they have borrowed ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... commence the scooting of the giant hens. They drove them into Urshot, where there was a Rural Fete, and Urshot took them as the crowning glory of a happy day. They began to be shot at near Findon Beeches, but at first only with a rook rifle. Of course birds of that size could absorb an unlimited quantity of small shot without inconvenience. They scattered somewhere near Sevenoaks, and near Tonbridge one of them fled clucking for ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... temper, and opening a great mouth, until he looked like an old rook which is about to caw, the Councillor would stamp his foot several times, as though preparing to dance to the boys' shouting, and lower his head, grasp his umbrella like a bayonet, and charge at the lads with a ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... young rook goes without saying. An older bird would not have given a second glance to the thing. Indeed, one would have thought his own instinct might have told him that broken glass would be a mistake in a bird's nest. But its glitter drew him too strongly for resistance. I am inclined ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... and Mathilda his wife." The two beautifully carved figures of a knight and his lady that lie in the Bruce Chapel are not Bruces for the surcoat of the man is adorned with the arms of the Rockcliffes—an heraldic chess-rook and three lions' heads. Both the knight and his lady wear the collar of SS, the origin of which is still wrapped in obscurity. Traces of gilding are visible in several places on the wings of the ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... Highland padyane,[62] Syne ran a fiend to fetch Mac Fadyane,[63] Far northward in a nook, By he the Correnoch had done shout,[64] Ersch-men[65] so gather'd him about In hell great room they took: These termagants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersch began to clatter, And roup[66] like raven and rook. The devil so deaved[67] was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smored[68] them ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of Rook, between New Guinea and New Britain, when any misfortune has happened, all the people run together, scream, curse, howl, and beat the air with sticks to drive away the devil, who is supposed to be the author of the mishap. From the spot where the mishap took place they drive him step by ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... he were an eagerly ambitious man, surely we should see much more positive signs of this ambition; and surely too, with his great powers, he would already have risen high, instead of being a mere ensign, short of money, and playing Captain Rook to Roderigo's Mr. Pigeon. Taking all the facts, one must conclude that his desires were comparatively moderate and his ambition weak; that he probably enjoyed war keenly, but, if he had money enough, did not exert ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... was given him, and picked up what he found. There were some who would gladly have brought him within the bounds of an ordered life; he soon drove them to despair, however, for the streets had been his nursery, and nothing could keep him out of them. But the sparrow and the rook are just as respectable in reality, though not in the eyes of the hen-wife, as the egg-laying fowl, or the dirt-gobbling duck; and, however Gibbie's habits might shock the ladies of Mr. Sclater's congregation who sought ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... knights, as we see them in the earliest French romances, have little in common with their Celtic prototypes, as we dimly catch sight of them in Irish, Welsh, and Breton legend. Chretien belonged to a generation of French poets who rook over a great mass of Celtic folk-lore they imperfectly understood, and made of what, of course, it had never been before: the vehicle to carry a rich freight of chivalric customs and ideals. As an ideal of social conduct, the code of chivalry never touched the middle and lower ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... weigh eight or ten tons, is so nicely poised upon another rook, upon a high point about fifty rods west of the lake, that a gentle pressure of the hand will cause it ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... clocks in the town sounded so shrill and poor after that, which I considered mine especially. There are rooks flying home to the elms in the Close. I wonder if they are the same that used to be there when I was a girl. They say the rook is a very long-lived bird, and I feel as if I could swear to the way they are cawing. Ay, you may smile, Ellinor, but I understand now those lines of Gray's you ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... knife. There are a number of non-analytical people who would be quite prepared to believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with physical conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. Our conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men to cut. If you have ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the sound of oo in food, hoof, mood, rood, roof, soot, aloof, and from the sound of oo in book, good, nook, hood, rook, look, foot, crook. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Is there a bird beneath the blue That has more charms than you? No animal in everything can shine. By just partition of our gifts divine, Each has its full and proper share. Among the birds that cleave the air The hawk's a swift, the eagle is a brave one, For omens serves the hoarse old raven, The rook's of coming ills the prophet; And if there's any discontent, I've heard not of it. Cease, then, your envious complaint; Or I, instead of making up your lack, Will take your ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... and its blink Of shining points which, upon this side, sink In dark, yet still are there; this ragged crane Spreading his wings at seeing us with vain Terror, forsooth; the trees, a pulpy stock Of toadstools huddled round them; and the flock— Black wings after black wings—of ancient rook By rook; has not the whole scene got a look As though we were the first whose breath should fan In two this spider's web, to give a span Of life more to three flies? See, there's a stone Seems made for us to sit on. Have men gone By here, and passed? ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... you rook of Nizhni Novgorod!" the strangers' coachman shouted. Selifan tightened his reins, and the other driver did the same. The horses stepped back a little, and then came together again—this time getting a leg or two over the traces. In fact, so pleased did the skewbald seem with his new ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... hostility, Sir James spared no pains to win their good will. He gave the Terror a rook-rifle and Erebus boxes of chocolate. If he chanced on them when motoring in the afternoon he would carry them off, bicycles and all, in his car and regale them with sumptuous teas at the Grange; and at Colet House he entertained them with stories of the African forest ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... number being thus immediately filled up. But the original difficulty remains; for if your farmers had not killed your sparrows and rooks, what would have become of those which now immigrate into your parish? in the middle of England one is too far distant from the natural limits of the rook and sparrow to suppose that the young are thus far expelled from Cambridgeshire. The check must fall heavily at some time of each species' life; for, if one calculates that only half the progeny are reared and bred, how enormous ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the Songster Family,—the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... concentrated on this island. Indeed, I doubt if a sweeping together of all the birds of the United States into any two of the largest States would people the earth and air more fully. There appeared to be a plover, a crow, a rook, a blackbird, and a sparrow to every square yard of ground. They know the value of birds in Britain,—that they are the friends, not the enemies, of the farmer. It must be the paradise of crows and rooks. It did me good to see them so much at home about the fields and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... as a rook's wing, but far away down the street burned a little light, like a red star truant from heaven. The Prince riding by descried it for a lanthorn, with an ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... instant on wings of canvas and sticks of steel. How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm. Many a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions should look forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle whose nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... had stepped upon the piazza, and saw the drooping head, the dangling arms, and the changed face of her husband. "Dead! dead!" she exclaimed. "My God! what has happened? Mildred, who was with him? Was the doctor sent for? or Squire Clamp? or Mr. Rook? What did he say to you, dear?" And she tried to lift up the sobbing child, who still clung to the stiffening knees where she had so often ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... morning calls I ever saw were formal, every one stiff, and speaking by rote, or talking politics. How glad I used to be to get on horseback again! But to see these—why, it is like the shepherd's glimpse at the pixies!—as one reads a new book, or watches what one only half understands—a rook's parliament, or a gathering of sea-fowl ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... can recall the picture of the grey old house of God rising calm before me, of a rook wheeling round the steeple, of a ruddy morning sky beyond. I remember something, too, of the green grave-mounds; and I have not forgotten, either, two figures of strangers straying amongst the low hillocks and reading the mementoes graven on the few ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... west of the island, that the wind being at east-south-east, I could not fetch it, wherefore I kept on to the southward, and stemmed with the body of a high island about eleven or twelve leagues long, lying to the southward of that which I before designed for. I named this island Sir George Rook's Island. ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... the Horse Show, which she drove to with Mrs. Mannering in a hired fly. I don't call it very polite to the hostess, do you? This afternoon she amused herself from her bedroom window by shooting at rabbits just beyond the wire fence of the lawn with a rook rifle; she did not hit any rabbits, but she got a gardener in the leg, and the man was very angry, and bled a great deal, and had to be taken away, and I think it was very careless of her, ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... it. At a distance, when our smoke-sail yard was manned; we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose in the midst of us. "Doey, get beyond me, zur; doey, Mr Rattlin," he would say. "Ah! zur, I'd climb with any bragger in this ship for a rook's nest, where I ha' got a safe bough to stand upon; but to dance upon this here see-sawing line, and to call it a horse, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Makfadyane, Far north-wast in a neuck; Be he the coronach had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took. Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook. The Devil sae deaved was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... of the rook, and the vast increase of these birds of late years in certain parts of Essex, has been productive of great mischief, especially in the vicinity of Writtle and of Waltham. Since February last, notwithstanding ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... Larks quiver up by us, "higher, ever higher," hastening up to get a first glimpse of the coming monarch, careless of food, flooding the fresh air with song. Steadily plodding rooks labour along below us, and lively starlings rush by on the look-out for the early worm; lark and swallow, rook and starling, each on his appointed round. The sun arises, and they get them to it; he is up now, and these breezy uplands over which we hang are swimming in the light of horizontal rays, though the shadows ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... gun in his younger days, was much amused, in his quiet way, at seeing Griff watch Chapman off on his rounds, and then betake himself to the locality most remote from the keeper's ears to practise on the rook or crow. Martyn always ran after him, having solemnly promised not to touch the gun, and to keep behind. He was too good-natured to send the little fellow back, though he often tried to elude the pursuit, not wishing for a witness to his attempts; ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Robert of Pickering, Adam de Bruce and Mathilda his wife." The two beautifully carved figures of a knight and his lady that lie in the Bruce Chapel are not Bruces for the surcoat of the man is adorned with the arms of the Rockcliffes—an heraldic chess-rook and three lions' heads. Both the knight and his lady wear the collar of SS, the origin of which is still wrapped in obscurity. Traces of gilding are visible in several places on the wings of the angels that support the heads of ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... me, or my wife, or servant Saurea—do your best, swindle us, rook us, I promise you your interests won't suffer, ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... The Sun sinks to rest; The rooks are all flying Straight home to their nest. "Caw!" says the rook, as he flies overhead: It's time little people ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... would argue. "How could you go rook-shooting? You know you scream when a gun goes off; and besides, ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... former literary friends in Scotland—he is writing to Mallet: "Far from defending these two lines, I damn them to the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, prepared of old for Mitchell, Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Wherever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably the perverse criticisms ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... expenditure of physical force. Anyone at all conversant with philosophical thought, if I may adopt a simile used by Mr. H. G. Wells, "would as soon think of trying to kill the square root of 2 with a rook rifle." Physical violence can only solve purely physical problems. But as man no longer exists, if he ever did exist, in the completely unsocial "state of nature,"[86] the relations of one individual with another are no longer purely physical: their position as members of one society ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... fires that kept the Government officials in Atlanta at a white heat. They were burning now. If one of the officials could have crawled to the edge of the gorge, where everything seemed dwarfed by the towering walls of rook and the black abyss from which they sprang, he would have seen small fitful sparks of flame glowing at intervals upon the bosom of the deeper and blacker night below. These were the fires that all the power and ingenuity of the Government failed to smother, but they were now blown ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko, Captain Spade, and several of their companions took up position on the exterior base of the island. What would I not give to be able follow to them, and in the friendly shelter of a rook watch the ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... way, and began to tell the news of the town.... Never, by look or word or sign, helped to rub in what a beetle-headed idiot I'd been." She gulped. "I could have put my head down on the tablecloth and cried gallons"—she blew her nose again—"knowing 'd lost him a rook at least. For, of course, that flabby Slabberts creature counted for something in the game, or Brounckers wouldn't have wanted him. And Captain—my Captain!..." She threw a sparkling eye-dart tipped ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... wedding; and I was just in time to see it, for the procession was passing at that moment. First came a splendid cock-a-doodle, all in black and gold, like a herald, blowing his trumpet, and marching with a very dignified step. Then came a rook, in black, like a minister, with spectacles and white cravat. A lark and bullfinch followed,—friends, I suppose; and then the bride and bridegroom. Miss Wren was evidently a Quakeress; for she wore a sober dress, and a little white veil, through which her bright eyes shone. The bridegroom ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... tail at sight o' the scarecrow. For et didn' seem like no ord'nary scarecrow, sir, wi' that eye a-glintin' in the sunshine. I cou'd see 't from where I sot—an' so the birds thought. Well, wan arter another, they steps up an' flies off as ef hurried for time, when by-'m-by 'long comes an ould rook. ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nothing to be found of us, yet afterwards a farm-boy brought a tale of how he had come suddenly on men lurking under a wall, and how one had a bloody foot and leg, and how the other sprung upon him and after a fierce struggle wrenched his master's rook-piece from his hands, rifled his pocket of a powder-horn, and made off with them like a hare towards Corfe. And as to Maskew, some of the soldiers said that Elzevir had shot him, and others that he ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... not let the mother-bird suffer in one day the loss of her young and her own liberty. And he who regarded in olden time the conduct of man toward the brutes, to-day looks down from heaven and is interested in every minnow that swims the stream, and every rook that cleaves the ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... seemed to make a deeper stillness all about him. When the wind was rumbling in the chimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the house. When the old trees outside were so shaken and beaten, that one querulous old rook, unable to sleep, protested now and then, in a feeble, dozy, high-up "Caw!" When, at intervals, the window trembled, the rusty vane upon the turret-top complained, the clock beneath it recorded that another ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... on these downs, as in so many other places in England, is the rook, and let us humbly thank the gods who own this green earth and all the creatures which inhabit it that they have in their goodness left us this one. For it is something to have a rook, although he is not a great bird compared with ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... is true, that affirmation and denial stand for distinctions of fact that cannot be got rid of by manipulation of words. Whether granite sinks in water, or not; whether the rook lives a hundred years, or not; whether a man has a hundred dollars in his pocket, or not; whether human bones have ever been found in Pliocene strata, or not; such alternatives require distinct forms of expression. At the same time, it may be granted that many ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... enclosing the place in a high wall of foliage. In the branches are the rooks' nests, built of small twigs apparently thrown together, and yet so firmly intertwined as to stand the swaying of the tree-tops in the rough blasts of winter. In the spring the rook builds a second nest on the floor of the old one, and this continues till five or six successive layers may be traced; and when at last some ruder tempest strews the grass with its ruin, there is enough wood to ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... you shall learn where to move the pieces and how to tell me what Grandy has moved—then, we shall tie a handkerchief over my eyes—as we do when you and I play hide the thimble—my hands shall not touch the men at all. I shall say 'Pawn to Queen's Rook's square' and you shall put this little man here—this is the Queen's Rook's square—" It must have been the oddest game in the world, really, between that stern old man and the blindfolded invalid and the grave little girl who was learning to play. Of course it was easier for Octavia—she ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... minutely the trim gardens, the picturesque domains, the rook-haunted groves, the gloomy chambers and gloomier galleries of an ancient hall with which I was acquainted, I resolved to attempt a story in the bygone style of Mrs. Radcliffe, substituting an old English squire, an old manorial residence and an old English highwayman for the Italian ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... avowed, that friendship must not interfere with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this cold-blooded gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and will rook their nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger? I hope I would go as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would not put on my hat to do a pleasure to society. I may starve my appetites and control my temper for the sake of those ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a river. One serene evening the idle members amused themselves with chasing each other through endless mazes, and in their flight they made the air sound with an infinitude of discordant noises. In the midst of these playful exertions it unfortunately happened that one rook, by a sudden turn, struck his beak against the wing of another. The sufferer instantly fell into the river. A general cry of distress ensued. The birds hovered with every expression of ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... is that O'Brien was without doubt the man who fired at you, looking to the type of gentleman he is, and the fact that you ran into him immediately afterwards, and especially the fact that he actually does possess an old rook rifle. He thinks he may have done it out of sheer Irish deviltry, you offering so convenient a target, just as they pot landlords in his own happy country. A man can hardly have drunk as heavily as he must have ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... read the stories now being told in the Spectator about rooks and wasps as Policemen. "W.H.W.H." says that a pair of rooks were persecuted while building their nest, and that a big rook was deputed to guard them from attack—which he did, like other policemen, by employing the "beak." There is really nothing at all remarkable about this tale. Rooks are much more wonderful creatures than anybody ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... from the feathered brood Which through the garden seeks its food Pick out for a commending word Each one his own peculiar bird; Hail the plump tit, or fitly sing The finch's crest and flashing wing; Exalt the rook's black satin dress-coat, The thrush's speckled fancy waistcoat; Or praise the robin, meek, but sly, For breast and tail and friendly eye— These have their place within my heart; The sparrow owns the larger part, And, for no virtues, rules in it, My reckless cheerful favourite! ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... difference, my bully rook: that Truscott would catch us before we got to Laramie—unless we ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... that this name denotes the magpie. It may possibly be traced to the same root as that of a cognate species, the cornix frugivora; Roeck, Germ., according to Gesner; Friesic, roek; Ang.-S. hroc, the rook: but I am at a loss to discover anything similar in old French to explain the occurrence of the termination, which seems to be a popular or familiar diminutive, a ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... reader that the O. Egyptian "Rokh," or "Rukh," by some written "Rekhit," whose ideograph is a monstrous bird with one claw raised, also denotes pure wise Spirits, the Magi, &c. I know a man who derives from it our "rook" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... prospectus) with "the various world centres." The reading-room was well supplied with "commercial organs." The talk was that of Wall Street; and the pupils (from fifty to a hundred lads) were principally engaged in rooking or trying to rook one another for nominal sums in what was called "college paper." We had class hours, indeed, in the morning, when we studied German, French, book-keeping, and the like goodly matters; but the bulk of our day and the gist of the education centred in the exchange, where we were ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... highway strewn, And morning opening all her doors; The cawing rook, the distant train, The ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... very doubtful as to the occurrence of the Jay in the Island, and adds that the local name for the Mistletoe Thrush is "Geai." Mr. Gallienne, in a note to Professor Ansted's list, confirms the scarcity of the Jay, as he says the Rook and the Jay are rarely seen here, although they are indigenous to Jersey. The local name "Geai" may perhaps have misled him as to the occasional appearance of the Jay. I have never seen a real Jay ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... Ch'un exclaimed. "Instead of bracing up your energies now to rook some money out of our venerable senior, you ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... and plain the Word of God is against this sin, and them that use it. And therefore Mr. Badman, for that he used by these things thus to rook and cheat his neighbours, is rightly rejected from having his name in and among ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... houses lying on the pier to the topmost round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird's-nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them too; for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in the faith of his ancestors, and ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... varied prospects in every direction, while from the glen which surrounds the castle hill like a deep moat filled with a forest, the spring winds swell up as from a sea of woodland, and the snatches of bird-carolling and cawing rook-discourse float up to one from nests in the topmost branches of tall trees, far below one's feet, as one stands ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Quality, indeed (as is their custom, which makes 'em so Hated by Foreigners), kept themselves very much to themselves, and my Lord Duke of Tantivy's party, with the exception of the Marquis of Newmarket, who was good enough to Borrow a score of gold pieces from us, and to Rook us at cards now and then, took not the slightest notice of my poor little Master, who was dying to be introduced into Polite Society, and spread abroad those fictions of his cousinage to Lady Betty Heeltap and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... staggering continuity of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally; but the Rook does not teach pamphleteering literally. And the 'of old' is redundant, for rhyme's sake, since Rooks hold parliaments now as ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... year at Rook's Rough, just as Ben put 'em in, 'Twas Fan found the rogue who was curled in the whin; She pounced at his brush with a drive and a snap, "Yip-Yap, boys," she told 'em, "I've found him, Yip-Yap;" And they put down their noses and sung to his line Away down the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... very high rate; and besides I had had enough of garrison duty, even could I have got back my commission, which was not very likely. So I put soldiering out of the question; and yet, when I had done so, I was infernally puzzled to think of any thing better. I had no fancy to turn rook, and rove from place to place in search of pigeons—no uncommon resource with younger brothers of an idle turn and exhausted means. I had fallen in with a few birds of that breed, and had come to the conclusion that to save themselves work and trouble, they had adopted by far the most laborious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... included in the education of "Izunsabe," which he took upon himself, a course of elemental doctrine in the one true game. And the boy fought his way up at such a pace that he jumped from odds of queen and rook to pawn and two moves in less than two years. And now he could almost give odds to his tutor, though he never presumed to offer them; and trading as he did with enlightened merchants of large Continental sea-ports, who had plenty of time on their hands and played well, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... way, bumping his head against a wall like a hooded rook as he was. So giddy had he become at the sight of this creature, even more enticing than a siren rising from the water. He noticed the animals carved over the door and returned to the house of the archbishop with his head full ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... roads, Often with both hands had to lug them out? Us, who, not having jujubes for our coughs, Took day-long foot-baths in the freezing Danube? Who just had leisure when some officer Came riding up, and gayly cried "To arms! The enemy is on us! Drive him back!" To eat a slice of rook—and raw at that, Or quickly mix a delicate ice-cream With melted snow and a ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan. Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... and laughter. He had been engaged, as we have noted, to furnish a text for some comic drawings, thus reversing the usual order of illustration. The pictures were intended to poke fun at a club of sportsmen; and Dickens, who knew nothing of sport, bravely set out with Mr. Winkle on his rook-shooting. Then, while the story was appearing in monthly numbers, the illustrator committed suicide; Dickens was left with Mr. Pickwick on his hands, and that innocent old gentleman promptly ran away with the author. Not being in ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... to his rest, but his name remains green among the villagers. To-day the traveler can see his elevated grave at Tigme[a]rook, about six miles east of the village of Tigara, at which place his career came to a sudden end through the agency of an arrow driven by ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... the window, but all was quiet outside. "Let him blow!" I thought, undressed myself, and got into the magnificent bed, where I seemed to be fairly swimming in milk and honey! The old linden in the court-yard rustled, a rook now and then flew off the roof, and at last, completely happy, I ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... man, with grave, but gentle look— His silence sweet with sounds With which the simple-hearted Spring abounds: Lowing of cattle from the abbey grounds, Chirping of insect, and the building rook, Mingled like murmurs of a dreaming shell; Quaint tracery of bird and branch and brook Flitting across the pages of his book, Until the very words a freshness took— Deep in his cell, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... coffee-house in detail. The room "stinks of tobacco worse than hell of brimstone;" the coffee itself had the appearance of "Pluto's diet-drink, that witches tipple out of dead men's skulls;" and the company included "a silly fop and a worshipful justice, a griping rook and a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer and an errant pickpocket, a reverend non-conformist and a canting mountebank, all blended together to compose an oglio of impertinence." There is a delightful sketch of one named "Captain ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... particular business. Even at this distance I seem to hear you rasping it: "Salvation, damnation, damnation, salvation!'' And the jolly earth smiles in the perfect evenglow, and the corn ripples and laughs all round you, and one young rook (only fledged this year, too!), after an excellent simulation of prostrate, heart-broken penitence, soars joyously away, to make love to his neighbour's wife. "Salvation, damnation, damn — '' A shifty wriggle of the road, and he is transformed once more. Flung back in ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... or he had rare discrimination of relative chances in the run of the cards, or the phenomenally bold hand he played disconcerted his adversaries, but his almost invariable winning began to affect injuriously his character. Indeed, he was said to be a rook of unrivalled rapacity. Colonel Duval was in the frame of mind that his wife called "bearish" one morning as his family gathered for breakfast in the limited privacy of their circle about the round table in ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... when they are busy with family cares, feeding the little ones, and teaching them to fly, there is not much time for singing. It is said that every bird has a different note or call. I wonder how many you know? I fancy I can guess: the cock, the rook, the swallow, the thrush, the blackbird, the lark; if you do not know the notes or calls of all these, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... ten minutes before dinner in the shadow of the library-door. He sleeps in his turret with a complaining flag- staff over his head, and has some leads outside on which, any fine morning when he is down here, his black figure may be seen walking before breakfast like a larger species of rook. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... organ before the Academy of Sciences at Paris, in which he aptly compared it, in its uses, to the trunk of an elephant. In its manners it is gentle and familiar, and when approached raises a cry which may be compared to a hoarse croaking. In its gait it resembles the rook, and walks much better than most of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... two Bishops. The eight men in front are called Pawns. At the beginning of the game the queen always stands upon a square of her own colour. The board is so set that each player has a white square at the right hand end of the row nearest to him. The rook, knight and bishop on the right of the king are known as King's rook, King's knight, and King's bishop; the other three as Queen's rook, Queen's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... himself—seventy, last birthday. Next, his unmarried sister—nearly eighty. Next, his man-servant, Mr. Rook—well past sixty. And last, his man-servant's wife, who considers herself young, being only a little over forty. That is the household. Mrs. Rook is coming to-day to attend Emily on the journey to the North; and I am not at all sure that Emily will ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... forward to the old forsaken shepherd's hut in which the king had taken refuge. They climbed the rook as nimbly as cats, and now the old boards cracked and groaned and flew in every direction, and were received with shouts of joy by the surrounding soldiers. Suddenly a guard officer stepped from the hut, and saw with horror its destruction; he ordered the soldiers ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... there a woman to be found. Vain things were plenty—there was the turkey, and the swan, and the blue jay, and the wood-duck, and the wakon bird; and noisy, chattering, singing creatures, such as the daw, and the thrush, and the rook, and the prairie-dog, abounded—indeed there were more of each than was pleasing to the ear—but of women, vain, noisy, laughing, chattering women, there were none. It was, indeed, quite a still world to what it is now. Whether it is better and happier, will depend ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... then that I look to the thickening rook, An' watch by the midnight tide; I ken the wind brings my rover hame, An' the sea that he glories to ride. Oh, merry he sits 'mang his jovial crew, Wi' the helm heft in his hand, An' he sings aloud to his boys in blue, As his e'e's ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... old Molly Mallone. She wint away just two minutes be the clock before the pig, and wos buried the day afther. There's no more news as I knows of in the parish, except that your old flame Mary got married to Teddy O'Rook, an' they've been fightin' tooth an' nail ever since, as I towld ye they would long ago. No man could live wid that woman. But the schoolmaster, good man, has let me off the cow. Ye see, darlin', ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... the grasshopper says, "but I am in fear of being pounced upon by a hungry bird. What bird have I most reason to fear?" The ants answer: The rook, the lark, ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... on an island (Findon) sprinkled with trees, and with a park-like bank sloping to the water. This was refreshing to the eye after having seen nothing but bare rook for many days. The meeting was at our friend's house who owned the pretty little farm. It was sweet and refreshing; and afterwards a number of these people accompanied us to the boat, and did not quit their standing till we ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... close of the third book (a most beautiful one) of Goldsmith sitting looking out of window at the Temple trees, you speak of the "gray-eyed" rooks. Are you sure they are "gray-eyed"? The raven's eye is a deep lustrous black, and so, I suspect, is the rook's, except when the ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... entered by such a door, lived Colonel Warren, my host, and under his roof, the morning after my arrival, I first definitely felt that I had left the West behind me, when I found that a noise by which I had been just awakened, and which sounded like the cawing of a rook, was that of the muezzin borne from a neighboring minaret and requesting ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Christmas Carol J.R. Lowell The Power of Christmas Peace on Earth S.T. Coleridge The Christmas Tree Old English Christmases Holly and Ivy Eugene Field Holiday Chimes Christmas Dolls Elizabeth J. Rook Red Pepper A. Constance Smedley A Game of Letters Elizabeth J. Rook Under the ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... keep well his comb, For the fox and the fulmart they are false both. When the raven and the rook have rounded together, And the kid in his cliff shall accord to the same. Then shall they be bold, and soon to battle thereafter. Then the birds of the raven rugs and reives, And the leal men of Lothian, are louping on their ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... to fish in the "river," as he called the canal. When his feet slipped and he fell in, his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does any one sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all his life: he was dead, and that is all. As for granny, she felt no twinge: ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Rook and the sorrowful Crow, To tell birds the cause why in mourning they go, Ever since their old loves their embraces forsook; And all seemed to pity the Crow and ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... in crowds, Their chiefs were captured and bound, Overwhelmed by my terrible force, Like a rook detached from ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... sequestered wood. The Elm is its favorite, on which it usually builds; but such is its attachment to locality that since the incident alluded to in the following Poem took place the Rooks have, many of them, built in fir trees at a little distance from their former habitation. The habits of the Rook are well worthy the attention of all who delight in the study of ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... were executed. The two Mills were not hung in chains, but having neither friend nor relation to take them away their bodies were thrown into a hole near the gallows, into which also was placed Jackson's body. Carter's body was hung in chains on the Portsmouth Road, near Rake; that of Tapner on Rook's Hill, near Chichester; those of Cobby and Hammond on the sea coast near Selsey Bill; so that from a great distance they could be observed across the sea by the ships as they went by east and west. Later on, John, the brother of Richard Mills, and one of the gang, was also arrested. When the ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... the club less than a thousand pounds. He had been extremely hard up before the loss of the money, and it was in his offices that the roll of banknotes had been lost. As for Probable Thief Number Two, he played rook to Number One's pigeon. He had a visible hold upon him; Number One trembled before him, and did what he was bidden to do. Number Two had plenty of money, and as shady a reputation as any man in London ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the black-cock continues his spel for hours during successive days, and in the case of the capercailzie "with an agony of passion," we are led to suppose that the females which are present are thus charmed. (50. L. Lloyd, 'The Game Birds of Sweden,' etc., 1867, pp. 22, 81.) The voice of the common rook is known to alter during the breeding-season, and is therefore in some way sexual. (51. Jenner, 'Philosophical Transactions,' 1824, p. 20.) But what shall we say about the harsh screams of, for instance, some kinds of macaws; have these birds as bad taste for musical sounds as they ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... sons', wives for their husbands' fate, And orphans for their parents' timeless death,— Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born. The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, And chatt'ring pies in dismal discord sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope, An indigested and deformed lump, Not like the fruit ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... hear that from them they blush at from a Woman—But I make a Challenge to any Person of common Sense and Reason—that is not wilfully bent on ill Nature, and will in spight of Sense wrest a double Entendre from every thing, lying upon the Catch for a Jest or a Quibble, like a Rook for a Cully; but any unprejudic'd Person that knows not the Author, to read any of my Comedys and compare 'em with others of this Age, and if they find one Word that can offend the chastest Ear, I will submit to ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... avail themselves of my services. My tapes are dirtier and my white hat grows less "sea-going" every day and even you, Eli, are being forgotten. The company commander still carols sweetly in the morning about "barrackses" and fire "distinguishers," rookies still continue to rook about the camp in their timid, mild-eyed way, while week-old sailors with unwashed leggins delight their simple souls with cries of 'twenty-one days.' New goats have sprung up to take your place in the ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task. At the same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit his harsh, throaty hunger-call. The rook gone, he would drop once ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... his horn, To let the neighbors know, This was Robin's wedding-day, And they might see the show. And first came parson Rook, With his spectacles and band, And one of Mother Hubbard's books He ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... commanding a burial-ground, and I have a whole clerk to myself, and he has nothing to do but look at the burial-ground, and what he will turn out when arrived at maturity, I cannot conceive. Whether, in that shabby rook's nest, he is always plotting wisdom, or plotting murder; whether he will grow up, after so much solitary brooding, to enlighten his fellow-creatures, or to poison them; is the only speck of interest that presents itself to my professional view. Will you ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... hostilities. A little further on, at some distance from the coast of New Ireland, the English discover the Islands of Denis and St. John. Dampier is the first to pass through the strait which separates New Ireland from New Britain, and discovers Vulcan, Crown, G. Rook, Long ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... everything was in due order, the straps set fast, the keys duly turned in the locks—the labels—"Mr. Eustace Greyne: Passenger to Algiers: via Marseilles"—carefully written out in a full, round hand. Rook's tickets had been bought; so now everything was ready, and the last evening in England might be spent by Mr. Greyne in the drawing-room and by Darrell in the servants' hall quietly, socially, ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... noisy parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or, take as an example the web-footed family: Do not all the geese and the innumerable host of ducks quack? Does not every member of the crow family caw, whether it be the jackdaw, the jay, or the magpie, the rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the songster family—the nightingales, the thrushes, the mocking-birds, the robins; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;—and to think there are people who would educate, who ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and the stars burned more brilliantly. With the hookah gurgling softly at his feet, Mohammed leaned back his head and gazed in silent appreciation at the wonders of the heavens. There was Turka Kabar, the crocodile; and Menish el Tabir, the sleeping beauty; and Rook Hamana, the leopard, and there—up there to the far north—was a shooting star. How gracefully it shot across the sky, leaving its wake of yellow light behind it! It was the season for shooting stars, he recollected. In an instant ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... patches where the snow had fallen more thickly. The trees and hedges were black and hard against the white horizon that was tightly stretched like the paper of a Japanese screen. The smell of burning wood was in the air, and once and again a rook slowly swung its wheel, cutting the air as it flew. The cold was so pleasantly sharp that it was the best possible thing for Uncle Mathew, who was accustomed to an atmosphere of hissing gas, unwashen glasses, and ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... valley, so there was no fear that we should lack for food. At its western end the valley narrowed into a canon. There was no choice of paths, for this was the sole outlet, and we were assured that we were on the right path by finding the King's symbol and the pointing arrow carved upon the rook. The canon descended very rapidly, and by noon we were so far below the level of the Mexican plateau that the air had a tropical warmth in it; and so warm was the night—for all the afternoon we continued to descend—that we ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... bishop, as I told you. Un eveque. A great big man with a red face shining with the snow. If he had not been white with snow he would have been as black as a rook. He stamped on the cobbles by the door and the snow went down off him in heaps, and there he was in his beautiful long clothes, and I said to myself: 'Whatever shall I do with him? Not the floor for such a man!' ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the legitimate ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... You have a melancholy temper. You ought to live out- of-doors, dig potatoes, make hay, shoot, hunt, tumble into ditches, and come home muddy and hungry for dinner. It would be much better for you than moping in your rook tower and ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... to which we are put, in order to stretch onward at their own pace. However, we must drink when we are thirsty, as well as they, and if the water happen to be low in the cistern, which, indeed, is mostly the case with us, we must, as the rook in the fable did with the pebbles, throw in rack-renting, drivings, executions, mortgages, loans, &c, in order to bring it within our reach—for there is ingenuity in everything, as the proverb says, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... unless he did so, he stood no chance of a second helping. A greedy man, that parson was, to be sure! I recollect his once eating up the whole of some little bird at dinner, and by way of diverting attention from his greediness, he told how he had heard that a rook soaked in vinegar and then dressed in a particular way, could not be distinguished from the bird he was then eating. I saw by the grim look of my grandfather's face that the parson's doing and saying displeased him; and, child as I was, ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the Mackenzies will take A white rook out of the wood, And will take a wife from a music-house With his people against him. And the heir will be great In deeds, and as an orator, When the Pope in Rome Will be cast off his throne, Over opposite Creagh-a'-chon Will dwell a ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... from the garden with Offitt, and turned down a filthy alley to a squalid tenement house,—called by its proprietor Perry Place, and by the neighbors Rook's Ranch,—to the lodge-room of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners, which proved to be Offitt's lodging. They found there a half dozen men lounging about the entrance, who scowled and swore at Offitt for being late, and then ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... towards her, stooped to snatch her weapon, a rook-rifle, from her, and swinging it high in the air, flung it back among the bushes and ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... me the "Raw Recruit," The joke of the awkward squad, The rook of the rookies to boot, And a bumpkin, a dolt and a clod; But this much I'll plead in defense I seem popular with these chaps, For they keep me a'moving thither and ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... bigger birds—ducks and puffins. Puffins have beaks like poll parrots, and are about the size of a rook; they have neat white shirt-fronts, and their beaks are red and yellow and blue, but they have silly faces, as if they thought of nothing but their own fine clothes. They live near water on cliffs, and sometimes ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Mathilda his wife." The two beautifully carved figures of a knight and his lady that lie in the Bruce Chapel are not Bruces for the surcoat of the man is adorned with the arms of the Rockcliffes—an heraldic chess-rook and three lions' heads. Both the knight and his lady wear the collar of SS, the origin of which is still wrapped in obscurity. Traces of gilding are visible in several places on the wings of the angels that support the heads of both figures, as well ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... financially. Gold was at a very high premium,—about two dollars and eighty cents at this time,—and our cotton sold for one dollar and fifty cents per pound. The "Neimen" went into dock, and people came in hundreds to see the strange sight. She was covered with shells like a rook. Some of these shells were sent out to China, and Messrs. Russell & Co. (the owners) had them ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... work their will. But Arthur and his knights, as we see them in the earliest French romances, have little in common with their Celtic prototypes, as we dimly catch sight of them in Irish, Welsh, and Breton legend. Chretien belonged to a generation of French poets who rook over a great mass of Celtic folk-lore they imperfectly understood, and made of what, of course, it had never been before: the vehicle to carry a rich freight of chivalric customs and ideals. As an ideal of social conduct, the code of chivalry never touched the middle and lower classes, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... articles, crept down again, and went out of the house. She had a place of refuge in these cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been. This place was Rook's Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery's part when that young woman was particularly ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... remember that time Chip of the artillery was walking down Nassau Street, and a steam-boiler or something burst under the sidewalk and broke his leg? The first thing old Backbite said when he heard of it was, 'H'm! been drinking, I suppose.' Now here's Billings with a despatch. What is it, bully rook?" he hailed, as the adjutant ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... soon be reduced to the ranks; the animal is spoiled by sheer drink. Having been drunk every day in Khartoum, and now being separated from his liquor, he is plunged into a black melancholy. He sits upon the luggage like a sick rook, doing minstrelsy, playing the rababa (guitar), and smoking the whole day, unless asleep, which is half that time: he is sighing after the merissa (beer) pots of Egypt. This man is an illustration of missionary success. He was brought up from ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Sir Rook!" said a little lark, "The daylight fades; it will soon be dark; I've bathed my wings in the sun's last ray; I've sung my hymn to the parting day; So now I haste to my quiet nook In yon ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... time ago—I can't say when exactly, but it was before I came down here—this unnatural son introduced to the parental abode (which I think is either No. 5 or No. 6 in a row of young chestnuts abutting on the high road) a rook of more than dubious reputation, whom he persuaded his unsuspecting sire to put up for the night. And there the rook has been ever since. As I said, I have neither heard nor seen him, but I'm positive he's there. I am unable to give the precise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... of March, coming back from a long walk on the hills, I heard the bleat of the lamb and the impatient cawing of the rook that could not put its nest together in the windy branches, and as I stopped to listen it seemed to me that something passed by in the dusk: the spring-tide itself seemed to be fleeting across the tillage towards the scant fields. As the spring-tide advanced ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... a marshy piece of ground in quest of wild-ducks and snipes; but, when it was shot, had just knocked down a rook, which it was tearing in pieces. I cannot make it answer to any of our English hawks; neither could I find any like it at the curious exhibition of stuffed birds in Spring Gardens. I found it nailed up at the end of a barn, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... that might be available, and seldom failed to provide his master with a stimulant and irritant. On the morning following on Christian's return it was very evident that intelligence of unusual greatness seethed in the cauldron wherein fermented Mr. Evans' brew of news. His rook-like eye sparkled, his movements, even that walk for whose disabilities it may be remembered that the pantry boy had thanked his God, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... sweet, and verdant, springing up fresh between the old, and giving a tone to the rest as you look down into the bunches. Some blades are nearly grey, some the palest green, and among them others, torn from the roots perhaps by rooks searching for grubs, are quite white. The very track of a rook through the grass leaves a different shade each side, as the blades are bent ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... benzoni; china pagoda; Pacauca; Balanjar, a-muck; Pariah; Govi; Avarian; Abraiaman; Choiach; proques; Tembul and Betel; Sappan and Brazil; Balladi; Belledi; Indigo baccadeo; Gatpaul, baboon; Salami cinnamon; [Greek: komakon]; rook (in chess); Aranie; Erculin and Vair; Miskal. —— (of Proper Names), Curd; Dzungaria; Chingintalas; Cambuscan; Oirad; Kungurat; Manzi; Bayan; Kinsay; Japan; Sornau; Narkandam; Ceylon; Ma'bar; Chilaw; Mailapur; Sonagarpattanam; Punnei-Kayal, Kayal; Kollam (Coilum); Hili (Ely); Cambaet; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... us, yet afterwards a farm-boy brought a tale of how he had come suddenly on men lurking under a wall, and how one had a bloody foot and leg, and how the other sprung upon him and after a fierce struggle wrenched his master's rook-piece from his hands, rifled his pocket of a powder-horn, and made off with them like a hare towards Corfe. And as to Maskew, some of the soldiers said that Elzevir had shot him, and others that he died ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... account for it, Miss Lorton," said the gentleman's voice. "There, before you, is something better than theory. It is an indisputable fact. There is my king, with your queen immediately in front of him, and your rook in the distance guarding that strong-minded lady. And where is my queen? Why, gadding about with knights and bishops, when she ought to have been standing by the side ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... remind the reader that the O. Egyptian "Rokh," or "Rukh," by some written "Rekhit," whose ideograph is a monstrous bird with one claw raised, also denotes pure wise Spirits, the Magi, &c. I know a man who derives from it our "rook" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Jesus and the Holy Ghost. They didn't leave you alone a single minute. God and Jesus stood beside the bed, and Jesus kept God in a good temper, and the Holy Ghost flew about the room and perched on the top of the linen cupboard, and bowed and bowed, and said, "Rook-ke-heroo-oo! Rook-ke-keroo-oo!" ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... prominent eyes showed surprise at the statement. "He's a strange mixture, is Mr. Hilton. He's a fair nailer with a revolver. I've seen him hit a penny three times straight off at twelve paces, and, when in the mind, he would bowl over running rabbits with a rook rifle. Yet he never joined the shooting parties in October. Said it made him ill to see graceful birds shattered by clumsy folk. All the same, he would ill-treat a ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... up; hark! how it howls! methinks Till now I never heard a sound so dreary; Doors creak, and windows clap, and night's foul bird, Rook'd in ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... himself. It was characteristic of Dick, too, to call himself Romulus and his friend Remus, meaning no slight, simply because he always took himself for granted as the leading spirit. It had always been so even in the days when they had gone birds'-nesting or rook-shooting together in the woods around John's Devonshire home. Always John had yielded the lead to this freckled Irish cousin (the kinship was, in fact, a remote one and lay on their mother's side through the Ranelagh family); and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... your state tricks!" exclaimed Bucklaw—"your cold calculating manoeuvres, which old gentlemen in wrought nightcaps and furred gowns execute like so many games at chess, and displace a treasurer or lord commissioner as they would take a rook or a pawn. Tennis for my sport, and battle for my earnest! And you, Master, so dep and considerate as you would seem, you have that within you makes the blood boil faster than suits your present humour of moralising on political ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... the bugler, showed one common expression of conflict, irritation, and excitement, around chin and mouth. The quartermaster frowned, looking at the soldiers as if threatening to punish them. Cadet Mironov ducked every time a ball flew past. Rostov on the left flank, mounted on his Rook—a handsome horse despite its game leg—had the happy air of a schoolboy called up before a large audience for an examination in which he feels sure he will distinguish himself. He was glancing at everyone ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... she cared no more for his stately mother than for the dairy-woman! How could such a bewitching creature so lack refinement! The more he thought, the more inexplicable and self-contradictory her conduct appeared. Such a jewelled-humming-bird to make friends with a grubbing rook! The smell of the leather, not to mention the paste and glue, would be enough for any properly sensitive girl! Universally fascinating, why did she not correspond all through? Brought out in London, she would be the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... eye had mark'd her pass Across the linden-shadow'd grass Ere yet the minster clock chimed seven: Only the innocent birds of heaven— The magpie, and the rook whose nest Swings as the elm-tree waves his crest— And the lithe cricket, and the hoar And huge-limb'd hound that guards the door, Look'd on when, as a summer wind That, passing, leaves no trace behind, All unapparell'd, barefoot ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Heaven upon him. In his rage for improvement the fellow dared anything. Without my orders he cut down an old rookery which was sacred in the country, and had a prophecy regarding it, stating, 'When the rook-wood shall fall, down goes Hackton Hall.' The rooks went over and colonised Tiptoff Woods, which lay near us (and be hanged to them!), and Cornichon built a temple to Venus and two lovely fountains on their site. Venuses and Cupids were the rascal's adoration: ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thy priests, Al Kahlminar, then would I confront them and thee with the two elephants which my brother sent me lately from Geestan, on each of which I can place a rook with a slave cunning with the javelin, before which thy priests will flee; for the animals see no difference between priests and other mortals;—the elephant is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... thought all the other church clocks in the town sounded so shrill and poor after that, which I considered mine especially. There are rooks flying home to the elms in the Close. I wonder if they are the same that used to be there when I was a girl. They say the rook is a very long-lived bird, and I feel as if I could swear to the way they are cawing. Ay, you may smile, Ellinor, but I understand now those lines of Gray's you used to say ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... her what bird she thought I meant. She said, 'A nightingale.' This made me so angry that I nearly flung her to the ground: 'No, fool! ... Rook!' said I." ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... subject of this truthful history is a jet-black, middle-aged bird, commonly known in England as a rook, but nevertheless a notable specimen ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... confirmed by Mr. MacCulloch, who says he is very doubtful as to the occurrence of the Jay in the Island, and adds that the local name for the Mistletoe Thrush is "Geai." Mr. Gallienne, in a note to Professor Ansted's list, confirms the scarcity of the Jay, as he says the Rook and the Jay are rarely seen here, although they are indigenous to Jersey. The local name "Geai" may perhaps have misled him as to the occasional appearance of the Jay. I have never seen a real Jay in ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... all the generous space Of undulant plain; the rook and crow Hush; 'tis as if a silent grace, By Nature murmured, calmed the face Of Heaven above ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... My tapes are dirtier and my white hat grows less "sea-going" every day and even you, Eli, are being forgotten. The company commander still carols sweetly in the morning about "barrackses" and fire "distinguishers," rookies still continue to rook about the camp in their timid, mild-eyed way, while week-old sailors with unwashed leggins delight their simple souls with cries of 'twenty-one days.' New goats have sprung up to take your place in the life of the camp and belittle your past achievements, but to me, O unregenerate goat, you ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... to fetch Mac Fadyane,[63] Far northward in a nook, By he the Correnoch had done shout,[64] Ersch-men[65] so gather'd him about In hell great room they took: These termagants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersch began to clatter, And roup[66] like raven and rook. The devil so deaved[67] was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smored[68] ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... his soul—would have had us wedded. On the love day, when all walked together to St. Paul's, and the King hoped all was peace, we spoke our vows to one another in the garden of Westminster. She gave me this rook, I gave her the jewel of my cap; I read her true love in her eyes, like our limpid northern brooks. Oh! she was fair, fairer than yonder star in the sunset, but her father, the Lord Audley, was absent, and we could ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Elm is its favorite, on which it usually builds; but such is its attachment to locality that since the incident alluded to in the following Poem took place the Rooks have, many of them, built in fir trees at a little distance from their former habitation. The habits of the Rook are well worthy the attention of all who delight in the ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... from cassowary bones are well carved. They are a very noisy lot; one would think they were trying to see who could speak the loudest. They tell us it is impossible to cross to the other side, as further inland the ridge ends—and there is nothing but bare broken rook—inaccessible all round. The majority of the men are bearded and moustached, and have cassowary feathers like a pad behind, on which they sit. They dress with a string. The demand for salt is very great; grains are ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... soldiers and a schooner-rigged ship, helped him to embark them and sail them in the bath to foreign parts, trapped a squirrel and let it go again, allowed him to make havoc of his possessions, fired at bottles with his revolver for the boy's delectation, shot a crow or two with a rook-rifle, played an improvised game of fives with a tennis-ball, told him tales, and generally gave up the day to his amusement. What he did not do was to repeat the experiment of a year ago, or make any kind of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... are busy with family cares, feeding the little ones, and teaching them to fly, there is not much time for singing. It is said that every bird has a different note or call. I wonder how many you know? I fancy I can guess: the cock, the rook, the swallow, the thrush, the blackbird, the lark; if you do not know the notes or calls of all ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... room "stinks of tobacco worse than hell of brimstone;" the coffee itself had the appearance of "Pluto's diet-drink, that witches tipple out of dead men's skulls;" and the company included "a silly fop and a worshipful justice, a griping rook and a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer and an errant pickpocket, a reverend non-conformist and a canting mountebank, all blended together to compose an oglio of impertinence." There is a delightful sketch ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... truss. At the whole frisk and gambol. At the wolf's tail. At battabum, or riding of the At bum to buss, or nose in breech. wild mare. At Geordie, give me my lance. At Hind the ploughman. At swaggy, waggy or shoggyshou. At the good mawkin. At stook and rook, shear and At the dead beast. threave. At climb the ladder, Billy. At the birch. At the dying hog. At the muss. At the salt doup. At the dilly dilly darling. At the pretty pigeon. At ox moudy. At barley break. At purpose in purpose. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the wood in thuds, "God, God." The cry of the rook, "God," answers it The crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the same name; All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby, Wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap Repeat in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... I do not wish to shock you, so I will not tell you about the complete success of the booby-trap, nor of the bloodthirsty fight between Lucy and Bertha Kaurter in a secluded fives-court during rec. Dora Spielman and Gertrude Rook were agitated seconds. It was Lucy's form mistress, the adored Miss Harter Larke, who interrupted the fight at the fifth round, and led the blood-stained culprits into the hall and up the beautiful picture-like steps ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... wanted also to be able to ask with a steady face at what distance a man or woman could be killed by the weapon that might be offered me. I was pretty cool-headed in relation to such practical aspects of my affair. I had some little difficulty in finding a gunsmith. In Clayton there were some rook-rifles and so forth in a cycle shop, but the only revolvers these people had impressed me as being too small and toylike for my purpose. It was in a pawnshop window in the narrow High Street of Swathinglea that I found my choice, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... be paid at a very high rate; and besides I had had enough of garrison duty, even could I have got back my commission, which was not very likely. So I put soldiering out of the question; and yet, when I had done so, I was infernally puzzled to think of any thing better. I had no fancy to turn rook, and rove from place to place in search of pigeons—no uncommon resource with younger brothers of an idle turn and exhausted means. I had fallen in with a few birds of that breed, and had come to the conclusion that to save themselves work and trouble, they had adopted by far the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... things proposed teaching me to play at chess, which game he understood something of. I made an attempt, though almost against my inclination, and after several efforts, having learned the march, my progress was so rapid, that before the end of the first sitting I gave him the rook, which in the beginning he had given me. Nothing more was necessary; behold me fascinated with chess! I buy a board, with the rest of the apparatus, and shutting myself up in my chamber, pass whole days and nights in studying all the varieties of the game, being ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to mere ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... an old rook (gambler),' says the writer before quoted, 'take up a young fellow in a tavern upon this very bet. The bargain was made that the rook should have seven always, and the young gentleman six, and throw continually. To play they went; the rook won the first day L10, and ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... standing straight and pale, High pedestalled on some rook-haunted tower: She has two earrings, silver and vermeil, And eyes like stars ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... rails was excessive; it was, however, consolatory to feel that any little unpleasantness which might occur through the fact of the car leaving the track would be attended with some sense of alleviation. The rook is said to have thought he was paying dear for good company when he was put into the pigeon pie, but it by no means follows that a leap from an embankment, or an upset into a river, would be as disastrous as is usually supposed, if taken in the society of such pillars of the state as those I ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... his fishing-line somehow became twisted about his arms and legs, else most likely he would have scrambled out, as it was not very deep. This was the end; nor was he even remembered. Does any one sorrow for the rook, shot, and hung up as a scarecrow? The boy had been talked to, and held up as a scarecrow all his life: he was dead, and that is all. As for granny, she felt no twinge: she had ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... being at east-south-east, I could not fetch it, wherefore I kept on to the southward, and stemmed with the body of a high island about eleven or twelve leagues long, lying to the southward of that which I before designed for. I named this island Sir George Rook's Island. ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... is sheer libel," he answered presently. "Larssen could rook you for goodness knows what damages if you ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... horror of getting to the end of it. At a distance, when our smoke-sail yard was manned; we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose in the midst of us. "Doey, get beyond me, zur; doey, Mr Rattlin," he would say. "Ah! zur, I'd climb with any bragger in this ship for a rook's nest, where I ha' got a safe bough to stand upon; but to dance upon this here see-sawing line, and to call it a ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... them about like nine-pins—at once included in the education of "Izunsabe," which he took upon himself, a course of elemental doctrine in the one true game. And the boy fought his way up at such a pace that he jumped from odds of queen and rook to pawn and two moves in less than two years. And now he could almost give odds to his tutor, though he never presumed to offer them; and trading as he did with enlightened merchants of large Continental sea-ports, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... mean time, a rupture rook place in Europe between England and Spain, which turned the attention of the colony to a different object, and afforded Governor Moore an opportunity of exercising his military talents, and a new prospect of enriching himself by Spanish plunder or Indian captives. ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... well With flowery streams, the July feast befell, And there within the Chief-priest's fair abode They cast aside their trouble's heavy load, Scarce made aweary by the sultry day. The earth no longer laboured; shaded lay The sweet-breathed kine, across the sunny vale, From hill to hill the wandering rook did sail, Lazily croaking, midst his dreams of spring, Nor more awake the pink-foot dove did cling Unto the beech-bough, murmuring now and then; All rested but the restless sons of men And the great sun that wrought this happiness, And all the vale with fruitful hopes did bless. ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... own idea of it is that K. O. was trying you out on purpose. And I'll wager the K. O. was glad to find a rook sentry so thoroughly alive to his job. Though I doubt if you'll get commended in orders for just being awake. But that reminds me of something that happened to me, in the Philippines," laughed Brimmer. "I was sergeant ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... housekeeper's room;' for you see, unless he did so, he stood no chance of a second helping. A greedy man, that parson was, to be sure! I recollect his once eating up the whole of some little bird at dinner, and by way of diverting attention from his greediness, he told how he had heard that a rook soaked in vinegar and then dressed in a particular way, could not be distinguished from the bird he was then eating. I saw by the grim look of my grandfather's face that the parson's doing and saying displeased him; and, child as I was, I had some notion ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... even slightly staggering continuity of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally; but the Rook does not teach pamphleteering literally. And the 'of old' is redundant, for rhyme's sake, since Rooks hold parliaments now as much as ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... less than a thousand pounds. He had been extremely hard up before the loss of the money, and it was in his offices that the roll of banknotes had been lost. As for Probable Thief Number Two, he played rook to Number One's pigeon. He had a visible hold upon him; Number One trembled before him, and did what he was bidden to do. Number Two had plenty of money, and as shady a reputation as any man in London who was not among ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... generous patron should equip two brigantines and a fly-boat. Thither came, fast and frequent, the gamesters, in their different forms and calling. This, light, young, gay in appearance, the thoughtless youth of wit and pleasure—the pigeon rather than the rook—but at heart the same sly, shrewd, cold-blooded calculator, as yonder old hard-featured professor of the same science, whose eyes are grown dim with watching of the dice at midnight; and whose fingers are even now assisting his mental computation of chances and of odds. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... weeds grow up, they destroy them by covering them up in the interstices between the rows of rice, turning the mud over them with their hands. When they are to sow wheat, barley, pulse, or other grain, they grub up the surface of the ground superficially, earth, grass, and rook, and mixing this with some straw, burn all together. This earth, being sifted fine, they mix with the seed, which they sow in holes made in straight lines, so that it grows in tufts or rows like the rice. The field is divided into regular beds, well harrowed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... her, stooped to snatch her weapon, a rook-rifle, from her, and swinging it high in the air, flung it back among the bushes and bracken he had ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... come to bigger birds—ducks and puffins. Puffins have beaks like poll parrots, and are about the size of a rook; they have neat white shirt-fronts, and their beaks are red and yellow and blue, but they have silly faces, as if they thought of nothing but their own fine clothes. They live near water on cliffs, and sometimes use an old rabbit burrow for a nest, in which they lay one pure ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... noticed him he was amusing himself by picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task. At the same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit his harsh, throaty hunger-call. The rook gone, he would drop once more into his study of the buttercups, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... to solve questions of moral or political principle by the expenditure of physical force. Anyone at all conversant with philosophical thought, if I may adopt a simile used by Mr. H. G. Wells, "would as soon think of trying to kill the square root of 2 with a rook rifle." Physical violence can only solve purely physical problems. But as man no longer exists, if he ever did exist, in the completely unsocial "state of nature,"[86] the relations of one individual with another are no ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... word against Shad," protested Sir Ralph. "I have roared with laughter at his last play. Never did any one so hit the follies of town and country. His rural Put is perfection; his London rook is ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... bright eyes of the little Jan first came to be of tender interest with Mrs. Lake, she fully hoped, and constantly prophesied, that he would be "as black as a rook;" a style of complexion to which she gave a distinct preference, though the miller was fair by nature as well as white by ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the "Reminiscences of a Rook" would make a capital story. They are long-lived birds, and could tell tales of the past that would entirely eclipse our modern rubbish,' said Lavinia, taking a last look at the solemn towers, and the shadowy birds that ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... A materialist eats rook-pie, and cares for nothing else but a sound digestion. The spiritualist also eats rook-pie, but after the repast he will sentimentalise over dead rooks, without losing his belief in an all-merciful Providence. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... with Mrs. Mannering in a hired fly. I don't call it very polite to the hostess, do you? This afternoon she amused herself from her bedroom window by shooting at rabbits just beyond the wire fence of the lawn with a rook rifle; she did not hit any rabbits, but she got a gardener in the leg, and the man was very angry, and bled a great deal, and had to be taken away, and I think it was very ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... had no mind for the beautiful women and the good women he had seen there. No; it would not deceive me, that; it would not give me any pleasure. We have a proverb in the Highlands, that Annapla will often be saying, that the rook thinks the pigeon hen would be bonny if her wings were black; and that is a seanfhacal—that is ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... an island (Findon) sprinkled with trees, and with a park-like bank sloping to the water. This was refreshing to the eye after having seen nothing but bare rook for many days. The meeting was at our friend's house who owned the pretty little farm. It was sweet and refreshing; and afterwards a number of these people accompanied us to the boat, and did not quit their standing till we were out of sight. My heart yearned towards ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... byre and haven, Sheep in drifts are nipped and numb; Some belated rook or raven Rocks upon a sign-post dumb; Mere-waves, solid as a clod, Roar ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... searched the meadow that led down to the river. Yes, there were several rabbits out. With the white marguerites and the dew cobwebs, it was all moon-flowery and white; and the rabbits being there made it perfect. He wanted one badly to model from, and for a moment was tempted to get his rook rifle—but what was the good of a dead rabbit—besides, they looked so happy! He put the glasses down and went towards his greenhouse to get a drawing block, thinking to sit on the wall and make a sort of Midsummer Night's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not tell you how it started. It was in the Kootenay country— British Columbia, you know. Bunch of sharpers set about to rook me on a frame-up—a bunco game. Tom tipped me off, though I had snubbed him, like the egregious ass I was. I paid no heed; blundered into the trap. Wouldn't have minded losing the thousand pounds they wanted, but they brought a woman into the affair—made it appear as ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... and the fancy of the poet are the two grand considerations for which I live: if miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the best part of the functions of my soul immortal, I had better been a rook or a magpie at once, and then I should not have been plagued with any ideas superior to breaking of clods and picking up grubs; not to mention barn-door cocks or mallards, creatures with which I could almost exchange lives at any time. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... parents' timeless death,— Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born. The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, And chatt'ring pies in dismal discord sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope, An indigested and deformed lump, Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... estimated to weigh eight or ten tons, is so nicely poised upon another rook, upon a high point about fifty rods west of the lake, that a gentle pressure of the hand will cause it to ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... a forced smile, and took up the spare gun with an expression of countenance which a metaphysical rook, impressed with a foreboding of his approaching death by violence, may be supposed to assume. It might have been keenness, but it looked remarkably like misery. The old gentleman nodded; and two ragged boys who had ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... less strongly marked among the winged races, because they prefer to fly in search of fresh supplies when the old fail, and seldom provide cupboards or larders at home. Yet there are birds that make stores. After a full meal many of the crow tribe, including the raven, rook, and jackdaw, will put away and hoard what is left. A magpie once paid me a visit, perching on an ash-tree, the boughs of which almost brushed against my bedroom window. Very early one morning he awoke me by calling ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the "Raw Recruit," The joke of the awkward squad, The rook of the rookies to boot, And a bumpkin, a dolt and a clod; But this much I'll plead in defense I seem popular with these chaps, For they keep me a'moving thither and hence ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... We need only recall the harsh and noisy Parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the Songster Family,—the Nightingales, the Thrushes, the Mocking-Birds, the Robins; they differ ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... hard at the ruddy, impudent face, which instantly assumed an appearance of the most defiant unconcern, while its owner began to devote his energies to shying stones at an invisible rook upon the old church tower with great nicety ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... but among the next young families there are always a few pied ones." These changes of plumage, which appear and are inherited at various corresponding periods of life in the pigeon, canary-bird, and rook, are remarkable, because the parent-species undergo ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... is old Molly Mallone. She wint away just two minutes be the clock before the pig, and wos buried the day afther. There's no more news as I knows of in the parish, except that your old flame Mary got married to Teddy O'Rook, an' they've been fightin' tooth an' nail ever since, as I towld ye they would long ago. No man could live wid that woman. But the schoolmaster, good man, has let me off the cow. Ye see, darlin', I towld him ye wos buildin' a palace in the say, to put ships in afther they wos wrecked on ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... little. "What! the millionaire?... Good biz! We'll rook him at poker and bridge and shooting, and a few other things. It isn't right for him to have all that money. It would even things up a little if we could transfer some of it to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... all.[55] We frequently came across tracks after this, but saw no more bears, which from everything but a gastronomical point of view was no loss. For there is no more sport in shooting the polar species than in knocking over a rook or a rabbit. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Clambering from rock to rook, always observant and watchful, the resolute youth pursued his way. Suddenly, however, he stood still, and threw himself flat ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sounds, beside some flowering tree The oboe of the dancing gnat, the cornet of the bee. Such tiny notes—and yet with ease their cadence I can trace, While over-head some passing rook puts in his noisy bass, Or from a green and shady copse, a daisied field away, I hear the jarring discords of a ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... or eyrie, is high up on the ledge of some precipice, where hardly any enemy can come. Of course it is a very large nest; but it is not carefully or nicely built. It is a rough affair, like the rook's nest; a lot of sticks and twigs, and heath or grass, with a more comfortable hollow in the middle, which is padded with softer materials. Here the young are reared; and here the male bird brings home prey for the female and the eaglets; ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... in less than an hour, we found the horses tethered among the bushes. House there was none, which must be inconvenient when the weather is too tempestuous for crossing the strait from Parao. We took shelter from the heat under a rook, making studies of a group of picturesque shepherds, and amusing ourselves with some luscious grapes,—baskets of which were waiting for the return of the passage-boat to La Madelena,—while a pack-horse was loaded with ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... water, in field or forest, was there a woman to be found. Vain things were plenty—there was the turkey, and the swan, and the blue jay, and the wood-duck, and the wakon bird; and noisy, chattering, singing creatures, such as the daw, and the thrush, and the rook, and the prairie-dog, abounded—indeed there were more of each than was pleasing to the ear—but of women, vain, noisy, laughing, chattering women, there were none. It was, indeed, quite a still world to what it is now. Whether ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... an' so is old Molly Mallone. She wint away just two minutes be the clock before the pig, and wos buried the day afther. There's no more news as I knows of in the parish, except that your old flame Mary got married to Teddy O'Rook, an' they've been fightin' tooth an' nail ever since, as I towld ye they would long ago. No man could live wid that woman. But the schoolmaster, good man, has let me off the cow. Ye see, darlin', I towld him ye wos buildin' a palace in the say, to put ships in afther ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... twitters on the barn, The rook is cawing on the tree, And in the wood the ring-dove ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... report of the rifle, the weapon that had been so rigid and motionless slipped from behind the rock and clattered downward. It caught halfway between the rock and the bottom of the defile. There came no sound from behind the rook, ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... * blackbird, * lark, * yellowhammer, * robin, *wren, * golden-crested wren, * goldfinch, * chaffinch, * *greenfinch, pied wagtail, sparrow, * dunnock (hedge, accentor), missel thrush, starling, rook, jackdaw, *blackcap, * garden warbler, * willow warbler, * chiffchaff, * wood warbler, tree-creeper, * reed bunting, * sedge warbler, coot, water hen, little grebe (dabchick), tufted duck, wood pigeon, stock dove, * turtle dove, peewit, tit ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... roast : rost'i, -ajxo. rob : rabi. robe : vesto, robo. robust : fortika. rock : sxtonego, roko; balanci, luli. rod : vergo. "fishing-," hokfadeno. rogue : fripono, kanajlo. roll : rul'i, -igxi; kunvolvajxo, (bread) bulko. roof : tegmento. rook : frugilego. root : radik'o, enradiki. rope : sxnurego. rot : putri. round : ronda; cxirkaux. rouse : eksciti, veki. row : vico; remi. rubbish : rubo, forjxetajxo. ruby : rubeno. rudder : direktilo. rue : ruto; bedauxregi, penti. ruin : ruin'o, -igi. rule : regi, regado; ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... we looked like a parcel of larks spitted, with one great goose in the midst of us. "Doey, get beyond me, zur; doey, Mr Rattlin," he would say. "Ah! zur, I'd climb with any bragger in this ship for a rook's nest, where I ha' got a safe bough to stand upon; but to dance upon this here see-sawing line, and to call it a horse, too, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... more from Corbeil, on the right bank of the Seine, is one of the most charming villages in the environs of Paris, despite the infernal etymology of its name. The gay and thoughtless Parisian, who, on Sunday, wanders about the fields, more destructive than the rook, has not yet discovered this smiling country. The distressing odor of the frying from coffee-gardens does not there stifle the perfume of the honeysuckles. The refrains of bargemen, the brazen voices of boat-horns, have never awakened echoes there. Lazily situated ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... of a Rook" would make a capital story. They are long-lived birds, and could tell tales of the past that would entirely eclipse our modern rubbish,' said Lavinia, taking a last look at the solemn towers, and the shadowy birds that ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... pretend to account for it, Miss Lorton," said the gentleman's voice. "There, before you, is something better than theory. It is an indisputable fact. There is my king, with your queen immediately in front of him, and your rook in the distance guarding that strong-minded lady. And where is my queen? Why, gadding about with knights and bishops, when she ought to have been standing by the side of her ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Hieland Padyane:[144] Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, Far northwast in a neuck; Be he the coronach[145] had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took: Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook.[146] The Devil sae deaved[147] was with their yell; That in the deepest pot of hell He smorit[148] ...
— English Satires • Various
... field or forest, was there a woman to be found. Vain things were plenty—there was the turkey, and the swan, and the blue jay, and the wood-duck, and the wakon bird; and noisy, chattering, singing creatures, such as the daw, and the thrush, and the rook, and the prairie-dog, abounded—indeed there were more of each than was pleasing to the ear—but of women, vain, noisy, laughing, chattering women, there were none. It was, indeed, quite a still world to what it is now. Whether it ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... expenses. To take a holiday in England, with Rosa! To see it as though it was all fresh! The fancy took strong hold of me. I saw myself going through St. Paul's, the Tower, Monument and Westminster Abbey, as an alien. I saw the hungry landlady in the Bloomsbury boarding-house trying to rook me. 'Bloomsburys' have a very bad name in Italy among educated people. I read an article in the Stampa—very humorous it ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... timeless death,— Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born. The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top, And chatt'ring pies in dismal discord sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope, An indigested and deformed lump, Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... once at a hunting dinner, given by a worthy fox-hunting old Baronet, who kept Bachelor's Hall in jovial style, in an ancient rook-haunted family mansion, in one of the middle counties. He had been a devoted admirer of the fair sex in his young days; but having travelled much, studied the sex in various countries with distinguished success, and returned home profoundly instructed, as he supposed, in the ways ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Rikelot" in Huntingdonshire (vol. ii. p. 626.). I know not what has led to the supposition that this name denotes the magpie. It may possibly be traced to the same root as that of a cognate species, the cornix frugivora; Roeck, Germ., according to Gesner; Friesic, roek; Ang.-S. hroc, the rook: but I am at a loss to discover anything similar in old French to explain the occurrence of the termination, which seems to be a popular or familiar diminutive, a Gallicism, analogous ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... staircase commanding a burial-ground, and I have a whole clerk to myself, and he has nothing to do but look at the burial-ground, and what he will turn out when arrived at maturity, I cannot conceive. Whether, in that shabby rook's nest, he is always plotting wisdom, or plotting murder; whether he will grow up, after so much solitary brooding, to enlighten his fellow-creatures, or to poison them; is the only speck of interest that presents itself to my professional ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... there was quite a crowd of small birds, finches chiefly, but a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me sailed five herring gulls, high ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... "Good-night, Sir Rook!" said a little lark, "The daylight fades; it will soon be dark; I've bathed my wings in the sun's last ray; I've sung my hymn to the parting day; So now I haste to my quiet nook In ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... time I used to stand in the stable and my coat was brushed every day till it shone like a rook's wing. It was early in May, when there came a man from Squire Gordon's, who took me away to the hall. My master said, "Good-by, Darkie; be a good horse, and always do your best." I could not say "good-by", ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... country, and this river? We have plied here, men and boys, for years; and to be sure we cannot say that we never saw a swan: there are some here and there towards the fens, which make a low dull noise: but as for any harmony, a rook or a jackdaw, in comparison of them, may be looked upon ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... Have done the feat themselves by art; Like Indian widows, gone to bed In flaming curtains to the dead; 640 And men as often dangled for't, And yet will never leave the sport. Nor do the ladies want excuse For all the stratagems they use To gain the advantage of the set, 645 And lurch the amorous rook and cheat For as the Pythagorean soul Runs through all beasts, and fish and fowl, And has a smack of ev'ry one, So love does, and has ever done; 650 And therefore, though 'tis ne'er so fond, Takes strangely to the vagabond. 'Tis but an ague that's reverst, Whose ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... of the man and the fancy of the poet are the two grand considerations for which I live: if miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the best part of the functions of my soul immortal, I had better been a rook or a magpie at once, and then I should not have been plagued with any ideas superior to breaking of clods and picking up grubs; not to mention barn-door cocks of mallards, creatures with which ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... "You remember that when I got pipped in France in '15, they sent me out next time to Salonica. I hadn't been there very long before the question of exchange cropped up. In the early days most of us had English money only, and the villagers used to rook us frightfully changing it. I remember sending my batman, MacGusgogh, to a place for eggs, and he came back with the change for my Bradbury in nickel. I had a good look at it, and on each coin was the mystic inscription, 'DIHAP,' which is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... enough of garrison duty, even could I have got back my commission, which was not very likely. So I put soldiering out of the question; and yet, when I had done so, I was infernally puzzled to think of any thing better. I had no fancy to turn rook, and rove from place to place in search of pigeons—no uncommon resource with younger brothers of an idle turn and exhausted means. I had fallen in with a few birds of that breed, and had come to the conclusion that to save themselves work ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... The "huge nameless rook" has no gloom in its shadow; It catches the sun, it has found it a name; And the mountain grass covers like the turf of the meadow The arms ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... stiff, and speaking by rote, or talking politics. How glad I used to be to get on horseback again! But to see these—why, it is like the shepherd's glimpse at the pixies!—as one reads a new book, or watches what one only half understands—a rook's parliament, or a gathering of sea-fowl ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Oh, you! Did I say the 'root' had been striking then, or rather, that the seeds, whence the roots take leisure and grow, they had been planted then—and might not a good heart and hand drop acorns enough to grow up into a complete Dodona-grove,—when the very rook, say farmers, hides and forgets whole navies of ship-wood one day to be, in his summer storing-journeys? But this shall do—I am not going to prove what may be, when here it is, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... ord'nary scarecrow, sir, wi' that eye a-glintin' in the sunshine. I cou'd see 't from where I sot—an' so the birds thought. Well, wan arter another, they steps up an' flies off as ef hurried for time, when by-'m-by 'long comes an ould rook. ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... she packed up a bundle of articles, crept down again, and went out of the house. She had a place of refuge in these cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been. This place was Rook's Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery's part when that young woman was ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... the Bishop had perceived a drift of rooks when on their evening flight to the rookery were passing along the very line which divided the hawk from the heron. A rook is a hard temptation for a hawk to resist. In an instant the inconstant bird had forgotten all about the great heron above her and was circling over the rooks, flying westward with them as she singled out the plumpest ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the table with a small rook-rifle in her hands. The breech was open. She looked down the barrel, holding up the weapon so that the light might shine into ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... roll them about like nine-pins—at once included in the education of "Izunsabe," which he took upon himself, a course of elemental doctrine in the one true game. And the boy fought his way up at such a pace that he jumped from odds of queen and rook to pawn and two moves in less than two years. And now he could almost give odds to his tutor, though he never presumed to offer them; and trading as he did with enlightened merchants of large Continental sea-ports, who had plenty of time on their hands and played well, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... then suddenly there is a caw, a scurry, a rush, and they fly up as if shot out of the tree-tops. There is a flapping of wings, and much angry sound; they circle once or twice, and then sink back to their homes again. It is a beautiful sight to watch a rook volplaning down to a tree as you can watch them from the terraces at Lynton; moving on a level with your eye, you can see the detail of each movement of their wings, see them let themselves drop through the air, yet with muscles taut and legs and claws stretched ready for a foothold on the ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Forest. Such a torrent will not reach the lake without disporting itself into many little cataracts; and saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were grey, forget all the gratifications and all the guilt ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... their disposing. Nor was it till the hour of sunset that everything was in due order, the straps set fast, the keys duly turned in the locks—the labels—"Mr. Eustace Greyne: Passenger to Algiers: via Marseilles"—carefully written out in a full, round hand. Rook's tickets had been bought; so now everything was ready, and the last evening in England might be spent by Mr. Greyne in the drawing-room and by Darrell in the servants' hall quietly, socially, ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... there, he said. I do not believe he gave a thought of any sort to me in the presence of these fascinating creatures, and so he got himself trodden on. I suggested to him we should pile the baggage, and go and have an elephant hunt. He shook his head reluctantly, saying "Kor, kor," like a depressed rook, and explained we were not strong enough; there were only three Fans—the Ajumba, and Ngouta did not count—and moreover that we had not brought sufficient ammunition owing to the baggage having to be carried, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and knew just how to load and unload the tool-car, two sinecures of sorts, nothing was ever said to him. If any one dared to reprove him, myself for instance (a mere interloper to Jimmie), he would reply: "Yeh! Yeh! I know-a my biz. I been now with Misha Rook fifteen year. I know-a my biz." If you made any complaint to Rourke, he would merely grin and say, "Ha! Jimmie's the sharp one," or perhaps, "I'll get ye yet, ye fox," but more than that nothing ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... dahn on top o' t'grass, Clois to a runnin' brook, An' harken'd t'watter wagtails sing Wi' t'sparrow, thrush, an' rook. ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;—and to think there are people who would educate, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and Myles sat quite still, wondering if it was on account of any special one of his latest escapades that he had been summoned to the office—the breaking of the window in the Long Hall by the stone he had flung at the rook, or the climbing of the South Tower ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Serko, Captain Spade, and several of their companions took up position on the exterior base of the island. What would I not give to be able follow to them, and in the friendly shelter of a rook watch ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... ago—I can't say when exactly, but it was before I came down here—this unnatural son introduced to the parental abode (which I think is either No. 5 or No. 6 in a row of young chestnuts abutting on the high road) a rook of more than dubious reputation, whom he persuaded his unsuspecting sire to put up for the night. And there the rook has been ever since. As I said, I have neither heard nor seen him, but I'm positive he's there. I am unable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... still nests on the moor, although the eggs are taken every season. But the old birds are very wary, and manage to keep out of shot. The common rook, however, of late years, has got a bad name, as having taken up the marauding habits of the genuine crow. Owing to the improved cultivation of land, there is not now the supply of grubs on which the rook ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... the Duchy of Kittencorkenstringen, and then you must walk seventeen leagues and three quarters still further north, and then you must turn off to your right, just where you see the old fir-stump with the rook's nest in it; and then you must walk eleven leagues and a quarter more, and then turn to your left, and after you have kept straight on for about fifteen leagues more, you will see the wood where the magpie lives;—and then, if you walk quite through it to the other side, you will ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... with a stimulant and irritant. On the morning following on Christian's return it was very evident that intelligence of unusual greatness seethed in the cauldron wherein fermented Mr. Evans' brew of news. His rook-like eye sparkled, his movements, even that walk for whose disabilities it may be remembered that the pantry boy had thanked his ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... very noisy lot; one would think they were trying to see who could speak the loudest. They tell us it is impossible to cross to the other side, as further inland the ridge ends—and there is nothing but bare broken rook—inaccessible all round. The majority of the men are bearded and moustached, and have cassowary feathers like a pad behind, on which they sit. They dress with a string. The demand for salt is very great; grains are picked up, ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... and Sir Rowland spent many a night over wine and cards—to Sir Rowland's moderate profit, for he had not played the pigeon in town so long without having acquired sufficient knowledge to enable him to play the rook in the country. As Westmacott was passing up the High Street, a black shadow fell athwart the light that streamed from the door of the Bell Inn, and out through the doorway lurched Mr. Trenchard a thought unsteadily to hurtle so violently against Richard that he broke the long ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... of ground in quest of wild-ducks and snipes; but, when it was shot, had just knocked down a rook, which it was tearing in pieces. I cannot make it answer to any of our English hawks; neither could I find any like it at the curious exhibition of stuffed birds in Spring Gardens. I found it nailed up at the end of a barn, which is ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... Last year at Rook's Rough, just as Ben put 'em in, 'Twas Fan found the rogue who was curled in the whin; She pounced at his brush with a drive and a snap, "Yip-Yap, boys," she told 'em, "I've found him, Yip-Yap;" And they put down their noses and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... dipped in grease."[31] His father was a small farmer, and one who did not allow his boys to grow up in idleness. "My first occupation," he tells us, "was driving the small birds from the turnip-seed, and the rook from the pease; when I first trudged a-field, with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles; and at the close of the day, to reach home was a task ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the country, up here on top," Luck said to Applehead when they had climbed, by the twisting, sandy trail, to the sand dunes that lay on the edge of the mesa and stretched vaguely away under the stars. To the rim-rook line that separated this first mesa from the higher one beyond, Luck himself knew the sand-hills well. But beyond the broken line of hills off to the northwest he had never gone—and there lay the territory that belongs to the Navajos, ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... over!' cried Miss Betsey. 'David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... of steel. How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm. Many a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions should look forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle whose nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. How sad that the word "giddy" is used ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the moon. You go and try. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... of those inexcusable oversights which will sometimes afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms of one of her pawns. It was her first advantage. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... shows that they help comrades in distress. If a Wolf or a Rook be ill or injured, we are told that it is driven away or even killed by its comrades. Not so with Ants. For instance, in one of my nests an unfortunate Ant, in emerging from the chrysalis skin, injured her legs so much that she lay on her back ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... amplitudes of life, and freedom to stretch his arms and legs and raise his head and fill his lungs with fresh air, a passage such as this would have been impossible. Here and there, indeed, the walls widened somewhat through some fault in the rook, bur for the most part his elbows grazed the sides each time he ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... in the Lord, My works I count but dust; I build not there, but on his word, And in his goodness trust. Up to his care myself I yield; He is my tower, my rook, my shield, And for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... accomplished its mission. For here in Prather's Mill Road burned the slow fires that kept the Government officials in Atlanta at a white heat. They were burning now. If one of the officials could have crawled to the edge of the gorge, where everything seemed dwarfed by the towering walls of rook and the black abyss from which they sprang, he would have seen small fitful sparks of flame glowing at intervals upon the bosom of the deeper and blacker night below. These were the fires that all the power and ingenuity of the Government failed to smother, but they were now blown out ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... shock you, so I will not tell you about the complete success of the booby-trap, nor of the bloodthirsty fight between Lucy and Bertha Kaurter in a secluded fives-court during rec. Dora Spielman and Gertrude Rook were agitated seconds. It was Lucy's form mistress, the adored Miss Harter Larke, who interrupted the fight at the fifth round, and led the blood-stained culprits into the hall and up the beautiful picture-like steps ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... swallow twitters on the barn, The rook is cawing on the tree, And in the wood the ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... have looked out of the window, and then the vision of no short-sighted man could have got over the interval in the wall made by the narrow casement, which, after all, gave no other prospect than a Cumberland sky, with an occasional rook in it. But my father, I think I have said before, did not much care for scenery, and he looked round with great satisfaction ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its irony and essential force being much dimmed by obscure expression, and even slightly staggering continuity of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally; but the Rook does not teach pamphleteering literally. And the 'of old' is redundant, for rhyme's sake, since Rooks hold parliaments now as much ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... his horn, To let the neighbors know, This was Robin's wedding-day, And they might see the show. And first came Parson Rook, With his spectacles and band, And one of Mother Hubbard's books He held ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... had once sustained the cannon and the sentinel, but were now covered with weeds and wild flowers. The drum and fife had once been heard within these walls—the only music now is the cawing of the rook and daw. We paid a hasty visit to the various apartments, remaining longest in those of most interest. The room in which Martin the Regicide was imprisoned nearly twenty years, was pointed out to us. The Castle of Chepstow is still a magnificent pile, towering upon the brink ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... the artillery was walking down Nassau Street, and a steam-boiler or something burst under the sidewalk and broke his leg? The first thing old Backbite said when he heard of it was, 'H'm! been drinking, I suppose.' Now here's Billings with a despatch. What is it, bully rook?" he hailed, as ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... it ore, though," muttered Harry to himself. "I don't believe this rook holds gold enough to put a yellow plating on ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... One on 'em belonged to a man as I once knowed; leastways I remember him as a young chap. He was underkeeper at the Hall. The young woman he wanted to marry wouldn't 'ave 'im, so he shot hisself wi' a rook gun. I knowed it was 'im by the 'ole in 'is 'ead, no bigger nor a pea. Just think o' that! No bigger nor a big pea, I tell yer, and as round as if it had been done wi' a punch. I told my missis about it when I went 'ome to my ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... the train, the vibration caused by the unusual rate of speed over the very rough rails was excessive; it was, however, consolatory to feel that any little unpleasantness which might occur through the fact of the car leaving the track would be attended with some sense of alleviation. The rook is said to have thought he was paying dear for good company when he was put into the pigeon pie, but it by no means follows that a leap from an embankment, or an upset into a river, would be as disastrous as is usually supposed, if taken in the society of such pillars of the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... cruel old Mentor is not coming to tumble us down over a great rook, like Telemaque in ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his trembling oats uprun, His tufted barley yellow with the sun; Sees clouds propitious shed their timely store, And all his harvest gather'd round his door. But still unsafe the big swoln grain below, A fav'rite morsel with the Rook and Crow; From field to field the flock increasing goes; To level crops most formidable foes: Their danger well the wary plunderers know, And place a watch on some conspicuous bough; Yet oft the sculking gunner ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... fellow, Richarn, whom I had appointed corporal, will soon be reduced to the ranks; the animal is spoiled by sheer drink. Having been drunk every day in Khartoum, and now being separated from his liquor, he is plunged into a black melancholy. He sits upon the luggage like a sick rook, doing minstrelsy, playing the rababa (guitar), and smoking the whole day, unless asleep, which is half that time: he is sighing after the merissa (beer) pots of Egypt. This man is an illustration of missionary success. He was brought ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... peculiar utterance. Or, take as an example the web-footed family: Do not all the geese and the innumerable host of ducks quack? Does not every member of the crow family caw, whether it be the jackdaw, the jay, or the magpie, the rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the songster family—the nightingales, the thrushes, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... like a map unrolled to the distant horizon, presenting extensive and varied prospects in every direction, while from the glen which surrounds the castle hill like a deep moat filled with a forest, the spring winds swell up as from a sea of woodland, and the snatches of bird-carolling and cawing rook-discourse float up to one from nests in the topmost branches of tall trees, far below one's feet, as one stands ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... it down. Another told me to wait till the second mate caught me. "I'd be sorry then," he said, "that ever I spilt the slush;" with other sea-jests, all of them pretty brutal. It is said that if a strange rook comes to a rookery the other rooks peck it to death, or at any rate drive it away. I know not if this be true of rooks (I know that sparrows will attack owls or canaries, whenever they have a chance), but it is true enough of human beings. We all hate the ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... when she cared no more for his stately mother than for the dairy-woman! How could such a bewitching creature so lack refinement! The more he thought, the more inexplicable and self-contradictory her conduct appeared. Such a jewelled-humming-bird to make friends with a grubbing rook! The smell of the leather, not to mention the paste and glue, would be enough for any properly sensitive girl! Universally fascinating, why did she not correspond all through? Brought out in London, she would be the belle of the season! If he did ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, Far north-wast in a neuck; Be he the coronach had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took. Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook. The Devil sae deaved was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smorit them ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... prudence never to venture beyond small game, such as, at most, might crack the Christmas-box of a grocer's 'prentice, who vies with those that have little to hazard, and who therefore, having the larger stock, can always rook them by waiting for his good fortune, and by rising from the game when luck leaves him—such a one as he, my lord, I do not call a great gamester, to whatever other name he may ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the ruddy, impudent face, which instantly assumed an appearance of the most defiant unconcern, while its owner began to devote his energies to shying stones at an invisible rook upon the old church tower with great ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... far away as ever, and, getting out of bed, he drew the curtains, seeking the landscape, still hidden in the mist, only a few tree-tops showing over the grey vapour—the valley filled with it—and over the hidden hill one streak of crimson. A rook cawed and flew away into the mist, leaving Owen to wonder what the bird's errand might be; and this rook was followed by others, and seeing nothing distinctly, and knowing nothing of himself or of this woman whom he had loved so long, he returned to his bed frightened, counting ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... going free. God would not let the mother-bird suffer in one day the loss of her young and her own liberty. And he who regarded in olden time the conduct of man toward the brutes, to-day looks down from heaven and is interested in every minnow that swims the stream, and every rook that cleaves ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... to bigger birds—ducks and puffins. Puffins have beaks like poll parrots, and are about the size of a rook; they have neat white shirt-fronts, and their beaks are red and yellow and blue, but they have silly faces, as if they thought of nothing but their own fine clothes. They live near water on cliffs, and sometimes use an old rabbit burrow for a nest, in which they lay one pure white egg, and one only. ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the ebb of time From yon dull steeple's drowsy chime, Or mark it as the sunbeams crawl, Inch after inch, along the wall. The lark was wont my matins ring, The sable rook my vespers sing: These towers, although a king's they be, Have not a hall of joy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... go to a rook's nest?" said a gentleman to a boy of seven years old; he looked very grave, and having pondered upon the question for some minutes, answered, "I do not know what you mean by the word go." Fortunately for the boy, the gentleman who asked the question, was not a captious querist; he perceived ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... peculiarly strike their own note in the country scene. There is no good reason to confuse these curious and interesting fowl with any other of the crow family. Collectively they may be recognised by their love of fellowship, for none are more sociable than they. Individually the rook is stamped unmistakably by the bald patch on the face, where the feathers have come away round the base of the beak. The most generally accepted explanation of this disfigurement is the rook's habit of thrusting its bill deep in the earth in search of its daily food. This, on the face ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... Roll-book registrolibro. Roman, a Romano. Roman Roma. Romance (a novel) romano. Romance (music) romanco. Romantic sentimentala. Romp ludegi. Romp bubino, petolulo. Rood (crucifix) krucifikso, kruco. Roof tegmento. Roofing (material) tegmentajxo. Rook frugilego. Room cxambro. Room (space) spaco. Roomy vasta. Roost stangigxi. Rooster koko. Root, to take enradiki. Root-word radikvorto. Root (of trees, etc.) radiko. Root up elradiki. Rope sxnurego. Rosary rozario. Rose rozo. Rosebush rozarbeto. Rose-coloured ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... volley that ripped out from the defenders of the camp. Half of the marksmen fired to the right of the rook, the ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... the garden with Offitt, and turned down a filthy alley to a squalid tenement house,—called by its proprietor Perry Place, and by the neighbors Rook's Ranch,—to the lodge-room of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners, which proved to be Offitt's lodging. They found there a half dozen men lounging about the entrance, who scowled and swore at Offitt for being late, and then followed him sulkily up two flights ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... placed in a stout fork as a rule, is a large, strong, compact, stick structure, very like a Rook's nest at home, and like these is used year after year, whether by the same birds or others of the same species I cannot say. Of course they never breed in company: I never found two of their nests ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... The next two cases include the remaining specimens of the spiny-finned fish. Among these are the wolf fish; the curiously formed tobacco-pipe fish; the big-headed dolphins or anglers; the hand fish, with its long fins; and the rook fish. ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... wood, wine and servants for us, and they are excellent. She had the house scoured from Cellar to rook the curtains washed and put up, all beds pulled to pieces, beaten, washed and put together again, and beguiled the Marchese into putting a big porcelain stove in the vast central hall. She is a wonderful ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... broad-bladed spears—wheeled and manoeuvred. By the Nile all the tops of the palm-trees were crowded with daring riflemen, whose positions were indicated by the smoke-puffs of their rifles, or when some tiny black figure fell, like a shot rook, to the ground. In the foreground the gunboats, panting and puffing up the river, were surrounded on all sides by spouts and spurts of water, thrown up by the shells and bullets. Again the flotilla drew near the narrow channel; ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... slept well that night; after such unusual excitement it was hardly to be expected they would. But Griselda, being a little girl and not a rook, was so tired that two minutes after she had tucked herself up in bed she was quite sound asleep, and did ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... grow up, and at the age of eight, in spite of the advice of doctors, he was a frequent visitor at the Havana Chess Club. As he says in describing this period of his career, "Soon Don Celso Golmayo, the strongest player there, was unable to give me a rook." So you can see how good he was. Don Celso couldn't give him a rook. And if Don Celso ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedgerows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted treetops; with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light, the speech, the manners, the thousand differences. Mrs. Westgate's impressions had, of course, much less novelty ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... postilion should begin to blow his horn again, I listened at the window, but all was quiet outside. "Let him blow!" I thought, undressed myself, and got into the magnificent bed, where I seemed to be fairly swimming in milk and honey! The old linden in the court-yard rustled, a rook now and then flew off the roof, and at last, completely happy, I ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... A Christmas Garden A Christmas Carol J.R. Lowell The Power of Christmas Peace on Earth S.T. Coleridge The Christmas Tree Old English Christmases Holly and Ivy Eugene Field Holiday Chimes Christmas Dolls Elizabeth J. Rook Red Pepper A. Constance Smedley A Game of Letters Elizabeth J. Rook Under the ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... contemptuous; a little feline, for he allows his adversary a moment's freedom to escape and then pounces upon him with the soft-furred claws; assured of his superiority in the game, yet using only half his mind; fencing with one arm pinioned; chess-playing with a rook and pawn given to his antagonist; or shall we say chess-playing blindfold and seeing every piece upon the board? Is Bishop Blougram's Apology a poem at all? some literary critics may ask. And the answer is that through it we make acquaintance ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... public gets lean, winning nothing but hunger And a few scraps of scrip for its masses of gold; When the fat man goes further and takes to religion, A rascal in hymn-books and Bibles disguised, "It's a case," says Sir Henry, "of rook versus pigeon, And the pigeon gets left—well, I'm ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
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