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More "Rook" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and young, a simple child. 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 was ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... there was a fine commotion about it that evening, for the 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; but he was dreadfully indignant ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... for a 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 ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Yorke," 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 about six months ago with a general cargo. And 'there ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... 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 ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... is 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.]
... 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 ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... 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 brewing for her, but Mary Jane, whose ears had been twice boxed ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... some trees, neither very lofty nor very elegant, in the garden of the Royal Naval Asylum, at Greenwich; and although many very fine and lofty elms are in the park near, which one might naturally suppose the rooks would prefer, yet, such is the fact, there is not even one rook's nest in Greenwich Park. Possibly the company of so large a number of boys, and the noise which they make, determine these birds in the choice of such a place for their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... 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 ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... 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
... 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 ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... 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. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... is to take chess-men for "dollies," or 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, he imported new openings ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the principle of society, openly 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a pipe). Not such a bad dinner! Expect they'll rook us a lot for it, though. Rather fun, seeing the waiters all troop in with a fresh course, when the proprietor rang his bell. Like ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... 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 ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... 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 ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... 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 to imply wantonness or levity! ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... but Willoughby again mastered himself grimly. "Any one of us would have done it," he answered, ignoring the remark. "Severance made it easy. I did to him only what he tried to do to others. When he saw how good the mine was, he wanted me to help him rook them out of their stock, so that we could get it. Simple enough, of course, but they'd been square with me. No, I refused—but I did accommodate him to the extent of doing him out of his own block. He'd ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... band to give their morning meal, Was wont to love their song, when lingering morn Streak'd o'er the chilly landskip the dim light, And thro' the open'd lattice hung my head To view the snow-drop's bud: 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 explain the wonderous works Of Heaven to sinful man. ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... room 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
... the snipe. The snipe's a bird that wants watching. If you are unlucky, you may sit waiting at home, and miss his flying over, and then you must wait till autumn. . . . It is a business! The snipe is not a rook. . . . Last year he was flying the week before Easter, while the year before we had to wait till the week after Easter! Come, do us a favour, Semyon Mitritch, give us the gun. Make us pray for you for ever. As ill-luck would have it, Ignashka has pledged his gun for drink too. ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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 or girls?" said a congratulating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... friend and I,' replied the host, 'are going out rook-shooting before breakfast. He's a very good shot, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... 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 up from boyhood at ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... will be accompanied, during the day, by several of 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 ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... strange!" T'an Ch'un exclaimed. "Instead of bracing up your energies now to rook some money out of our venerable senior, you turn your thoughts ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... 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
... 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 all, She ran to that old ruin'd wall, To leave upon ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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
... describe somewhat 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 ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... irregular volley that ripped out from the defenders of the camp. Half of the marksmen fired to the right of the rook, ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... 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 ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... rook; drake, rake; flute, lute; pearl, earl; plane, lane; wheel, heel; spine, pine; trout, ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... as mysterious knockings, a particular sound of church-bells, or a bird flying into a room, are very grave warnings, and a story of this character comes from near Taunton. 'A farmer riding home from Taunton Market noticed a white rook among the sable flock settling over a field. When he reached home there were symptoms of uneasiness among his cattle, and that night the dogs barked so vociferously that he had to get up and quiet them. In the morning ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... could just drive. His father had always steadfastly refused to keep horses, but the fathers of other dogs were more progressive, and Ellis had had opportunities. He knew how to take the reins, and get up, and give the office; indeed, he had read a handbook on the subject. So he rook the reins and got up, and the Wakes ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... 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 ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... 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 the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... occupants, for whom a 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 ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... in English," she said pettishly. "You can't think how tiresome it is to hear that rook's language ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... cavalryman, how is my Rook behaving?" he asked. (Rook was a young horse Telyanin had sold ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... 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, too, ben't ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... 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 within 100 yards of each ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... 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
... sees 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 by surprise Will scatter death amongst them as they rise. These, hung in ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... 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
... done. Clambering from rock to rook, always observant and watchful, the resolute youth pursued his way. Suddenly, however, he stood still, and threw ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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
... 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 Cupids were the rascal's adoration: he wanted to take down ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... before the sexes are 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
... 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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.)
... them, And to exert their utmost 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 ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... 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
... 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 had haunted them ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... is sheer libel," he answered presently. "Larssen could rook you for goodness knows what damages if you got ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... 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 ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... * 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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]
... 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 ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... axe 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... sillier, Easy and 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; ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Different notes as rook from wren Hear we when our steps begin, And the choice is cast within, Where a robber raven's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... shadows, and come out of their lurking-places at the twilight summons, 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 quarter of an hour was gone, ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... a laminated rook often formed by the infiltration of water into the sand dunes on the Hawaian islands.—Corals and Coral ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in a grove on the banks of 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 anxiety over ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... 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 ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... 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 and rooks. It did me good to see them so much at home about the fields and even ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... I didn't mean it," cried Hal, turning in the terrible grip; "I thought it was only a rook!" ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... 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 ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... 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 ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... she mind him, 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 ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... 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
... Island, neither on land 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 ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... Preussen had, is German no longer, but Polish, Sclavic; not prospering by the change. [What Thorn had sunk to, out of its palmy state, see in Nanke's Wanderungen durch Preussen (Hamburg & Altona, 1800), ii. 177-200:—a pleasant little Rook, treating mainly of Natural History; but drawing you, by its innocent simplicity and geniality, to read with thanks whatever is in it.] And all that fine German country, reduced to rebel against its unwise parent, was cut away by the Polish sword, and remained with ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... 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
... 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 tea. I says, 'Do yer remember 'Arry Pole, the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... fair, though the profits are larger; and if you observe the 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
... 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
... 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 it didn't save ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 Bolvar 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, in spite of inexpressible ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... 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 of its pursuer, the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... 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 Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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
... cook 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; Then shall the poor people be spoiled full near, And ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... vast numbers of birds, though never as many of such different kinds as those named by Z.R.B. in the letter which you gave us in July. Sometimes, a great number of rooks gather in a ring, and in the center of it is one lonely, dejected-looking rook, who holds his head down in silence. The other rooks seem to hold a consultation, chattering and cawing back and forth, sometimes one alone and sometimes all together, until they seem to decide ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... 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 ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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
... A player cannot castle under any of the following circumstances:—1. If he has moved either King or Rook. 2. If the King be in check. 3. If there be any piece between the King and the Rook. 4. If the King, in moving, pass over any square commanded by any one ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... that draw in bubbles for old gamesters to rook; also a sergeant's yeoman, or bailiff's follower; ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 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 woman, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... prepared a scathing witticism with which to wither the young girl. But he did not have the pleasure of delivering it to Esperance, who had hidden herself behind her portrait at the foot of the rook. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... other 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
... came the 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 ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... 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, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Royston 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 ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... 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 ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... hope 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... 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 from the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... 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 did not know. She plucked ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... 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, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 the silence and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... When he saw this, he was confounded at her quickness and skill; but she laughed and said, 'O master, I will make a wager with thee on this third game. I will give thee the queen and the right-hand rook and the left-hand knight; if thou beat me, take my clothes, and if I beat thee, I will take thine.' 'I agree to this,' replied he, and they replaced the pieces, she giving him the queen, rook and knight. Then said ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... resolved to obliterate this badge of servitude and disgrace. The epistle of the emperor to the caliph was pointed with an allusion to the game of chess, which had already spread from Persia to Greece. "The queen (he spoke of Irene) considered you as a rook, and herself as a pawn. That pusillanimous female submitted to pay a tribute, the double of which she ought to have exacted from the Barbarians. Restore therefore the fruits of your injustice, or abide the determination of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... 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
... wife, or servant Saurea—do your best, swindle us, rook us, I promise you your interests won't suffer, if you accomplish ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... 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 ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... 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 in ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... very 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, ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... 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
... away 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 followed him sulkily up two flights ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... 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 ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... 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, except in ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... 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 ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... sich times as these,—nought o'th sort." "Well, but how 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 him ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... on 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 at bridge ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... 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 injured and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... 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 by misadventure, being killed by a stray bullet of one of his own men on the hill-top; ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... her 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
... in 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
... 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
... what strange 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 as ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... and the Bison eropea to the 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 as a very great variety of aquatic birds. Hunting and shooting give ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... "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 ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... 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 ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... 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 and give it her. I'll ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... 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 the ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... rock, 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 ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... 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 the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... 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 ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... 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 ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... nest, 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 ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... 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 ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • 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 ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... deceyuable eloquence & takyng of money deceyueth, & so he is made oonly. The iij. scil. e kny3t, hath iij. poyntes, & goth erwith; [he] betokenyth gentilmen at rennyth aboute, & ravisshith, and ioyeth for her kynrede, & for habundaunce of richesse. The fourth, scil. e rook, he holdith length & brede, and takith vp what so is in his way; he betokenyth okerers and false merchaunt3, at rennyth aboute ouer all, for wynnyng & lucre, & rechith not how thei geten, so that thei haue hit. ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... 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 ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... 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, too, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... 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 vertebrae of the tail are amalgamated to form a single bone ("ploughshare-bone"), ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... state of things is your own 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 ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... bird 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 ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... 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
... started 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, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... married Mary Alabama, the daughter of Dr. P.B. Ruff, he settled on his grandfather's plantation now known as Kinards. While living here his wife died, and a few years afterwards he married Lavinia Elizabeth, the daughter of Dr. William Rook. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... And you think to steal a march upon a man like me? I see you through and through (I know you like the clock); I read your thoughts like print. Brodie, you thought, has money, and won't do the job. Therefore, you thought, we must rook him to the heart. And therefore, you put up your idiot cockney. And now you come round, and dictate, and think sure of your Excise? Sure? Are you sure I'll let you pack with a whole skin? By my soul, but I've a mind to pistol you like dogs. Out of this! Out, I say, and soil ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... us, we gotta eat, and Jimmy—he can cook! (He makes a stew that tastes as good as mother used to make.) An' when he starts to flappin' cakes, why, every hungry rook Is droolin' at the mouth for them, ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... anxious to 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 life of the camp and ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... 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 ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... 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
... 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 ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... 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
... wonder,' remarked the Queen, 'that birds of taste are rare in the Metropolis, and that, on the Embankment especially, a rook would be regarded as a kind of prodigy. Nowhere has the manufacture of permanent scarecrows been conducted with more ingenious success. But tell me, my accomplished fowl, have Britons any other arts? Long ago the men used to paint themselves blue, but, as far as I have remarked, the ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... 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
... 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 Lake • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... and there I saw my 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, and we could go no ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... summoning rook to build, Dunnock his beak with moss has filled, Robin is bowing in coat-tails ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... wind up roun' 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
... utmost 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
... 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. How sad that the word ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... that night while she talked to me of the new song she had 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 of ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... an elbow hug; A maid that comes to a look; A boy to carry a rimy log From over the frozen brook— And, a fig for the cawing rook, Or ghosts in the ruddy gloam! For the kettle sings on the blackened hook, And hey! for the sweets ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... 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. So in a marble ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... back wound up one against England, and being all holds full of her own troubles. As I said, the strong way he laid it all before 'em blasted 'em, and when he'd done it was like a still in the woods after a storm. A little man—but they all looked little—pipes up like a young rook in a blowed-down nest, "Nevertheless, General, it seems you will be compelled to fight England." Quick Big Hand wheeled on him, "And is there anything in my past which makes you think I am averse to fighting ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... 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
... life of a whole 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 and rooks. It did me good to see them so much at home about ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... have an 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 ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... 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 and mists still lie on the wooded ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... 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 Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... 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
... 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 ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... 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 done ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... 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 mossy head-stones. I noticed ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... 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, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Identity of the Green with the Wood Sandpiper The Stoat The Marsh Titmouse Creeper Wrens' Nests Alarm-note of one Bird understood by other Species of Birds Dates of the appearance of some Spring Birds in 1832, at Clitheroe The Rook Serviceable to Man.—Prejudice against it Sandpipers On Birds Dressing their Feathers with Oil from a Gland Mocking powers of the Sedge-warbler The Water Ouzel Scolopax, Sabines, Sabine's Snipe Fish and other River Phenomena Lampreys On the Spawning of the Minnow Eels ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... honey of love my spirits thirst could stay. I sit at the chess with her I love, and she plays with me, With white and with black; but this contenteth me no way. Meseemeth as if the king were set in the place of the rook And sought with the rival queens a bout of the game to play. And if I looked in her eyes, to spy the drift of her moves, The amorous grace of her glance would doom ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... observed 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 some distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to mere men the fancy that it is ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... 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
... 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 tea. I says, 'Do yer remember 'Arry Pole, the young keeper in the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... have lately seen at Moreham Mains. But, be that as it 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 or mallards, creatures with which I could almost exchange lives at any time. If you ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... 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
... partridges were it not for the rooks and magpies. Hedges wherein the birds can hide their nests are few and far between in the wall country, so the keen-eyed rook spies out many a nest in the spring of the year. For this reason and because they eat the corn, the farmers hate them. We cannot share their feelings. We should be sorry to see the old rookery in the garden diminished in the slightest ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... "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 else, ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... Pride; and, what was sillier, Easy and 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 ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to a stranger, the little bushy-tailed animal rose from its place under the tree and came to him, and the rook, cawing once, flew down from its branch and settled ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... courtship of Dame Christian Custance [Constance], a widow of repute and wealth as well as beauty, by the gull and coxcomb, Ralph Roister Doister, whose suit is at once egged on and privately crossed by the mischievous Matthew Merrygreek, who plays not only parasite but rook to the hero. Although Custance has not the slightest intention of accepting Ralph, and at last resorts to actual violence, assisted by her maids, to get rid of him and his followers, the affair nearly breeds a serious quarrel between herself and her plighted lover, Gawin Goodluck; ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... trogons—a genus of 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 then at long intervals to ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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, which is ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... 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
... sturgeons, with their lancet spine; and the sea garters. 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
... Captain Yorke," 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 about six months ago with a general cargo. ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... a Royston 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, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... of them, what strange 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
... might have been the father and leader of them all, got up on a low post, and with wide-open beak poured forth a long series of most impressive caws. One always wonders at the meaning of such displays. Is the old bird addressing the others in the rook language on some matter of great moment; or is he only expressing some feeling in the only language he has—those long, hoarse, uninflected sounds; and if so, what feeling? Probably a very common one. The rooks appeared happy and prosperous, feeding in the meadow grass in that June weather, with ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... 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, Sate the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... check and mate! Thou mad'st it easy, friend. Thou never shouldst Have sacrificed the knight, for thus my rook Escaped, attacking thee. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... was dark 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 old man sleeping ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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] them ...
— English Satires • Various
... 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 ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... 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 ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... we 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 ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... us 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
... 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. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 injured ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... openly 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 I love; but society shall take me as I choose ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... courting, before the sexes are 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
... to Chesterfield, in the autumn of the year 1831, I first conceived the notion of writing this story. Wishing to describe, somewhat 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,—which had always inexpressible charms for me,—substituting an old English ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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 his years, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... 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
... their 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
... 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
... from 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
... habits 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 a vigilant watch, the rooks have stolen sets ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... I am not. Will forgets that I have other fish to fry and tails 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 ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... 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 to the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... 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
... 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. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... 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; they ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... 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
... a 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 ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... 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 been marshalled to ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... was examining the spoor of the game by the fountain, I suddenly detected an enormous old rook-snake stealing in beneath a mass of rock beside me. He was truly an enormous snake, and, having never before dealt with this species of game, I did not exactly know how to set about capturing him. Being ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... 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 ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... cousin, that this is a sort of paradise. I hear very little of the birds down where I live; and I may as well admit that I don't bother my head about them. Besides, there are one or two awkward customers among them, such as the crow, for instance, and the rook and the jackdaw, who all belong to the same family. Not to speak of the stork and the buzzard, for whom a ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... 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
... 1827, there was a rookery on some trees, neither very lofty nor very elegant, in the garden of the Royal Naval Asylum, at Greenwich; and although many very fine and lofty elms are in the park near, which one might naturally suppose the rooks would prefer, yet, such is the fact, there is not even one rook's nest in Greenwich Park. Possibly the company of so large a number of boys, and the noise which they make, determine these birds in the choice of such a place for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... 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 air.—DEWITT ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... of the owners as they drove up the pike. There was Rockwood, 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 rough-cut Tennessee marble with turrets and many gables, rejoicing in the classic name ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... compared 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. ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... best wheat, besides 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 ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... I,' replied the host, 'are going out rook-shooting before breakfast. He's a very good ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... 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. —Prometheus ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Russian Santa Claus Lizzie M. Hadley 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 ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... 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 ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... out to be a good one 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
... 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 ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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
... Pez 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 Bolvar 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, in spite of ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... 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 it would be gone—like a man's life! Saddened, ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... especially when they see the shifts 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, except in ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Chilworth boy, who can be charming as long as he's content to be stupid and wear what he's told to; but he gets the idea now and then that he'd like to be epigrammatic, and the result is like watching a rook trying to build a nest in a gale. Since he got wind of the book, he's been persecuting me to work in something of his about the Russians and the Yalu Peril, and is quite sulky because I ...
— Reginald • Saki
... summons, 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 quarter of an hour was gone, or the fire collapsed and ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... brook, rook; drake, rake; flute, lute; pearl, earl; plane, lane; wheel, heel; spine, pine; trout, rout; ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... something hopeless which she had to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster impending. Day after day was made inert with a sense of disaster. She became morbidly sensitive, depressed, apprehensive. It was anguish to her when she saw one rook slowly flapping in the sky. That was a sign of ill-omen. And the foreboding became so black and so powerful in her, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... 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 on the gentle slopes of a bank ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... 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: their position as members ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... was an inexperienced 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 ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 it by nature. It may seem ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 of skill and nicety that would astonish ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... 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
... father had always steadfastly refused to keep horses, but the fathers of other dogs were more progressive, and Ellis had had opportunities. He knew how to take the reins, and get up, and give the office; indeed, he had read a handbook on the subject. So he rook the reins and got up, and the Wakes ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... light was a rush 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
... 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 Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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," as ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... 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 ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... condescending and amiably 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 ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... 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
... 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
... the Saracen's Head, where he 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 ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... fond of walnuts as we are,'" read Miss Harson, "'and rob the trees without any mercy. Not only the little titmouse, but the grave and solemn rook'—a kind of crow, you remember—'is not above paying a visit to the walnut tree and stealing all he can find. There is a walnut tree growing in a garden the owner of which may be said to have planted it ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... 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 done without upsetting his brain a bit, and this theory seems ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... wolf-coats of Harald give rise to an O. N. term, "bear-sarks' way", to describe the frenzy of fight and fury which such champions indulged in, barking and howling, and biting their shield-rims (like the ferocious "rook" in the narwhale ivory chessmen in the British Museum) till a kind of state was produced akin to that of the Malay when he has worked himself up to "run-a-muck." There seems to have been in the 10th century ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... 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 done ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... beyond. 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 and mists still lie on the wooded ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... 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 ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... room since, except 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 of ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... 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
... 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
... 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, if ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tern and terns' eggs, lying out on the bare rock with no nest at all. Hooper also brought us two little gannets—all fluffy, but even at this age larger than a rook. As we got further up we began to come across the fossilized trees for which ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... monogamous; 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 ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... 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 boasted plumage ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... 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 to imply ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... 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, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... 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 of aquatic birds. Hunting and shooting ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... 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 said to be of the time of Luther, but ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 remember now, he DID die. Mortification ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... first 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, to pick from them whatever unconsidered trifle in the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... 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 ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... 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 Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... 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 bringing ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Command to place this chessboard before them, And to exert their utmost 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 send all to his ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... and I watched his eyes come into his face as he leaned forward! From a blurr' of lids they turned to beautiful clear balls shot through with yearning. Around the jut of rook appeared a bicycle girl, a golf girl, and a youth in knickers having his stockings laid in correct folds below the knee. They passed without noticing us. To see his looks dim and his eagerness relax was too painful. ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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 Reach and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • 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. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... bikn and kin; To pee and hal, And av and jal; To kair and poggra, Shoon and rokra; To caur and chore, Heta and cour, Moar and more, To drab and dook, And nash on rook; To pek and tove, And sove and rove, And nash on poove; To tardra oprey, And chiv aley; To pes and gin, To mang and chin, To pootch and pukker, Hok and dukker; To besh and kel, To del and lel, And jib to tel; Bitch, atch, and hatch, Roddra and latch; To gool and saul, And sollohaul; To pand ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... 'stands between the living and the dead.' Still from St. Mary's pulpit echoes wide Primo, beware of truth, whate'er betide; Deinde, from deep Charybdis while you steer Lest damned Socinus charm you with his sneer, Watch above all, so not Saint Thomas spake, Lest upon Calvin, Scylla's rook, you ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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
... 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
... 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 small girl popped ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... 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 ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... of the Green with the Wood Sandpiper The Stoat The Marsh Titmouse Creeper Wrens' Nests Alarm-note of one Bird understood by other Species of Birds Dates of the appearance of some Spring Birds in 1832, at Clitheroe The Rook Serviceable to Man.—Prejudice against it Sandpipers On Birds Dressing their Feathers with Oil from a Gland Mocking powers of the Sedge-warbler The Water Ouzel Scolopax, Sabines, Sabine's Snipe Fish and other River Phenomena Lampreys On the Spawning of the Minnow Eels On the ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... 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 ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... theorists may 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, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... 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 ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... * 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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. The fine arts, too—I ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thrush, Are brimful of music and glee; They have each got a nest in some bush, And the rook has built his ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... 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 ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... 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
... pheasants, of course, 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 ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... doctor, presently. "Set this down, will you, Sammy? Rook to queen's fourth. Check. Now, knight—any move. No—hold on. Yes. Knight any move. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... 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 crust, and bake ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... is coming, 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
... 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 ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... as it 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 or mallards, creatures with which I could almost exchange lives at any time. If you continue so deaf, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... 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 Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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
... 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 ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... 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 of his learned friends, that they were to share alike a poetic ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... "dollies," or 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, he imported new ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... wrongly rendered Don Quixote's remark that the English did not kill crows, believing that King Arthur, instead of dying, was by enchantment turned into one, and so fearing to injure the hero. Must he not have meant a rook? [Note: It has since been pointed out to me that the Don may ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... reproach contemptuously, and in a hectoring manner; to bluster, to abuse, and to insult noisily. Shakspeare makes mine host of the Garter dub Falstaff a bully-rook. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... 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, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... spoliate^, despoil, strip, sweep, gut, forage, levy blackmail, pirate, pickeer^, maraud, lift cattle, poach; smuggle, run; badger [Slang]; bail up, hold up, stick up; bunco, bunko, filibuster. swindle, peculate, embezzle; sponge, mulct, rook, bilk, pluck, pigeon, fleece; defraud &c 545; obtain under false pretenses; live by one's wits. rob Peter to pay Paul, borrow of Peter to pay Paul; set a thief to catch a thief. disregard the distinction between meum and tuum [Lat.]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... give their morning meal, Was wont to love their song, when lingering morn Streak'd o'er the chilly landskip the dim light, And thro' the open'd lattice hung my head To view the snow-drop's bud: 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 explain the wonderous works Of Heaven to sinful ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sore done wi' 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 came from his ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... 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
... 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 ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... 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 of its pursuer, ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... 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 on ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the spoor of the game by the fountain, I suddenly detected an enormous old rook-snake stealing in beneath a mass of rock beside me. He was truly an enormous snake, and, having never before dealt with this species of game, I did not exactly know how to set about capturing him. Being very anxious to preserve his skin entire, and not wishing to have recourse ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... 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 ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... 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 spire, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Grand-duke. —I, too, have suffered persuasion. All Europe, raven and rook, Screeched at me armed for your nation. Your cause in my heart struck spurs; I swept such warnings aside for you: My very child's eyes, and Hers, Grew like my brother's who died for you. You'll call ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... at a time they went—decently and in order, like true Newfoundland sailors, Tom Rook, the first hand, the last of all. When they were all ashore, they scrambled like mad up the cliff; and they were no more than out of danger when the First Venture was blown to atoms. There was a flash, a deafening roar—and darkness; broken ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... 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
... 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, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... having but so few years back wound up one against England, and being all holds full of her own troubles. As I said, the strong way he laid it all before 'em blasted 'em, and when he'd done it was like a still in the woods after a storm. A little man—but they all looked little—pipes up like a young rook in a blowed-down nest, "Nevertheless, General, it seems you will be compelled to fight England." Quick Big Hand wheeled on him, "And is there anything in my past which makes you think I am averse ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... 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. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • 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 mortals;—the elephant is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... 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
... of 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 when he discovered it was only a bird. He turned, and flew down ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... moving no piece, save after calculation, and ceased not to play, till she said, 'Check-mate.' When he saw this, he was confounded at her quickness and skill; but she laughed and said, 'O master, I will make a wager with thee on this third game. I will give thee the queen and the right-hand rook and the left-hand knight; if thou beat me, take my clothes, and if I beat thee, I will take thine.' 'I agree to this,' replied he, and they replaced the pieces, she giving him the queen, rook and knight. Then said she, 'Move, O master.' So he moved, saying in himself, 'I cannot ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... day a Royston 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 did you get ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... pry where none should pry, go begging with his sores, trade his own soul for his mother's. His pride becomes insolence, his tragedy hideous revolt, his impassivity swinish, his rock of sufficiency a rook of offence. God in His mercy, or the Devil in his despite, made the ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 about six months ago with a general cargo. ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... 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
... 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 ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... Queen, two Rooks (or Castles), 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, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... 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 ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... 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 ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... meal, Was wont to love their song, when lingering morn Streak'd o'er the chilly landskip the dim light, And thro' the open'd lattice hung my head To view the snow-drop's bud: 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 explain the wonderous works Of Heaven to sinful man. Ah! ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... an 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 corner square on the same ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... reflected from their 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 ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... we 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 ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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, ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... 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 crossed long ago; And ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... inexperienced 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 to suspect that ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... didn't. 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 ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... 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 these people out of the calm satisfaction ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... "Back out, 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 ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... 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, ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... though," muttered Harry to himself. "I don't believe this rook holds gold enough to put a yellow ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... 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
... "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 cook 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, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... plotted that night while she talked to me of the new song she had 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 of ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... but the 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... 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 when ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... 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 years had but ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a good one 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 mounted ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... stamping his lance as he went. He is the leader we have been waiting for. But it is not always thus that he speaks, Joseph interposed, I have heard him myself say: it is as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as it would be for a cow to calve in a rook's nest. As he went to and fro Nicodemus muttered: there is much to be said for this revision of his words. Jesus wishes to reach the imagination of the poor that know not swords. And he spoke for a ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... 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
... be many more partridges were it not for the rooks and magpies. Hedges wherein the birds can hide their nests are few and far between in the wall country, so the keen-eyed rook spies out many a nest in the spring of the year. For this reason and because they eat the corn, the farmers hate them. We cannot share their feelings. We should be sorry to see the old rookery in the garden diminished in the slightest ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... profits are larger; and if you observe the 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
... 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
... 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 Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... and 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 me ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... 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
... 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 ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... other fish to fry and tails 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 I pull. If your thoughts ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... 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 ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... a scene more silent and more desolate. There was no sign of life, and not a sound save the occasional cawing of a rook. Advancing towards the abbey, they passed a pile of buildings that, in the summer, might be screened from sight by the foliage of a group of elms, too scanty at present to veil their desolation. Wide gaps ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... next came the 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 ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... laid in our 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 woman, and we don't ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... commotion about it that evening, for the 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
... "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
... 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
... all 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
... 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 ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Th' Barrel Organ • Edwin Waugh
... 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 ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... 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
... 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
... 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 longings ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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, in spite of inexpressible suffering. The men had ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... and wide, 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 ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... 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 and the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... seem hard,' said Vea, when we were seated under the rook, 'to leave Patrick in the hands of strangers. And yet, Dr. Blyth is such a good, kind man, I'm sure he won't ...
— Bluff Crag - or, A Good Word Costs Nothing • Mrs. George Cupples
... silent, 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 for the ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Stepan could secure it, a keen disappointment to us 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
... the transition down to "hunky-dory" is easy. Those who see a sort of complemental relation to each other of linguistic affinity and the conformity in physical characters may infer from "Mikey-doo-rook" (a term of endearment equivalent to "Mavourneen" and used in addressing little children) that the inhabitants within the Polar Circle have something of the Emerald Isle about them. But no, they are not Irish, ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... and thrush, Are brimful of music and glee; They have each got a nest in some bush, And the rook has built ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... 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 by surprise Will scatter death amongst them as they rise. These, hung in triumph round ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... volley that ripped out from the defenders of the camp. Half of the marksmen fired to the right of the rook, ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... evening is coming, 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 were ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... Cock Robin, or Parson Rook with his little book?' said Lance, throwing the pen-wiper ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beauty in the scene; so much of brightness and mirth in the sunny landscape; such blithesome music in the songs of the summer birds; such freedom in the rapid flight of the rook, careering overhead; so much of life and joyousness in all; that, when the boy raised his aching eyes, and looked about, the thought instinctively occurred to him, that this was not a time for death; that Rose could surely never die when humbler ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... 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 ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the translators have wrongly rendered Don Quixote's remark that the English did not kill crows, believing that King Arthur, instead of dying, was by enchantment turned into one, and so fearing to injure the hero. Must he not have meant a rook? [Note: It has since been pointed out to me that the Don may ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... (to use 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 gist of the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... 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 not secure ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... natives, and put an end to 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, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... 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
... of their lurking-places at the twilight summons, 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 quarter of an hour was gone, or the fire collapsed ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... to it. I refuse to surrender the portcullis and the moat, the bastion and the well-manned towers, which were the features of every castle with which hitherto I have played, in order to take the field with allies so unromantic as a brace of rooks. You may tell me that "rook" is a corruption of this or that word, meaning something which has never laid an egg in its life. It may be so, but in that case you cannot blame me for continuing to call it the castle which ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... 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
... 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 ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... 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, ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... to have been introduced into the game until the eleventh century. The castle has undergone many changes; its older name of "rook" was derived from the Persian word rokh, a hero. No doubt all the pieces were then carved personalities, well understood from king to pawn. In the modern forms of Staunton and London Club patterns the knight ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... 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 Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... 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 give the precise date on which he first ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... island 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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. —Prometheus ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... 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, 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
... 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
... the highway strewn, And morning opening all her doors; The cawing rook, the distant train, The valley with its ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of her room since, except 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 of her, ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... fluttering for an 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. How sad that the word "giddy" is used to imply wantonness ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Santa Claus Lizzie M. Hadley 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 ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the moon. You go and try. It isn't ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... 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
... 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]
... 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 I choose ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men are coarse, sensual, ungodly, he often runs into riot in a 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 and ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... 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 ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... 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, he ran ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... oak. At feeby. At 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. At the bavine. At nine ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 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 is the increase! One has, however, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... this "Roc" of 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
... this is sheer libel," he answered presently. "Larssen could rook you for goodness knows what damages if ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... 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 ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... 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 to civilize him, the boy was no more about mischief in ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... long 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 of ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... and the Baron de 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 injured and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sticks 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 ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... spoliate[obs3], despoil, strip, sweep, gut, forage, levy blackmail, pirate, pickeer|, maraud, lift cattle, poach; smuggle, run; badger*; bail up, hold up, stick up; bunco, bunko, filibuster. swindle, peculate, embezzle; sponge, mulct, rook, bilk, pluck, pigeon, fleece; defraud &c.545; obtain under false pretenses; live by one's wits. rob Peter to pay Paul, borrow of Peter to pay Paul; set a thief to catch a thief. disregard the distinction between meum and tuum[Lat]. [receive stolen ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... sea that sinks and shelves, But ourselves, That rook and rise With endless and uneasy motion, Now touching the very skies, Now sinking ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... 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, ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... responded with 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 been ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... her horse a little nearer, so that she need not speak too loud. "Oh, she is something of a mystery. She is a widow, though she can't be more than twenty-four or five. She lives at the Rook Hotel, in Newbury, and has three horses stabled there. She must have been there a couple of months, now. A few people have called upon her, including my father and Aunt Hannah, but nobody seems to know anything ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... 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 help ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... 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 Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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 the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... 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 magic speed us to some remote point in the Caucasus, where we may ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over a surface of fine plush. We followed it from field to field and from stile to stile; it was all adorably the way to church. At the church we finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the workday world by the broad stillness of pastures—a grey, grey tower, a huge black yew, a cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and protrusions that had settled and sunk. The place seemed so to ache with consecration that ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... through the great 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. ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... leave their haunts near an old 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 ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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 ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... exert their utmost 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 ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... 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 ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... 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, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had, is German no longer, but Polish, Sclavic; not prospering by the change. [What Thorn had sunk to, out of its palmy state, see in Nanke's Wanderungen durch Preussen (Hamburg & Altona, 1800), ii. 177-200:—a pleasant little Rook, treating mainly of Natural History; but drawing you, by its innocent simplicity and geniality, to read with thanks whatever is in it.] And all that fine German country, reduced to rebel against its unwise parent, was cut away by the Polish sword, and remained ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... 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 ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... 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 crossed long ago; ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... 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
... 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
... Easy and 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 Jay, the Magpie, and the Swallow; And twenty more their ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... 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
... to describe somewhat 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
... 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, ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... her, with perfect truth, that I knew nothing of Mrs. Rook's secrets. Miss Redwood's humor took a satirical turn. 'Allow me to ask, sir, whether your eyes were shut, when our housekeeper found herself unexpectedly in your presence?' I referred the old lady ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... Abbey (January 24th, 1875) he describes the 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 ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... M. Hadley 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 Tree ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... 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
... 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
... elicited the facts that not only was the house of excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore without complaint, but that it was evident that every one depended on him, and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful view over London, and a rook. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... sheer libel," he answered presently. "Larssen could rook you for goodness knows what damages ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... 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 ore, though," muttered Harry to himself. "I don't believe this rook holds gold enough to put a yellow plating ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... 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
... 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
... Long-tailed Titmouse Identity of the Green with the Wood Sandpiper The Stoat The Marsh Titmouse Creeper Wrens' Nests Alarm-note of one Bird understood by other Species of Birds Dates of the appearance of some Spring Birds in 1832, at Clitheroe The Rook Serviceable to Man.—Prejudice against it Sandpipers On Birds Dressing their Feathers with Oil from a Gland Mocking powers of the Sedge-warbler The Water Ouzel Scolopax, Sabines, Sabine's Snipe Fish and other River Phenomena Lampreys On the Spawning ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... 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," as big a boaster as Falstaff, and a ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... 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 ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... 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 ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... 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 within 100 yards of each other, and, as a rule, they will not be found within ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Mains. But, be that as it 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 exchange lives at any time. If you continue so deaf, I am afraid a visit ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 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 then at long intervals ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... for the souls of the 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 ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... done wi' 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 ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... 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
... but 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. The poor bird sits on his branch swinging weakly ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... ordinary 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 ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... 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
... 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 all tied, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... 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 black ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... 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 ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... 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 ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... 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
... portents such as mysterious knockings, a particular sound of church-bells, or a bird flying into a room, are very grave warnings, and a story of this character comes from near Taunton. 'A farmer riding home from Taunton Market noticed a white rook among the sable flock settling over a field. When he reached home there were symptoms of uneasiness among his cattle, and that night the dogs barked so vociferously that he had to get up and quiet them. In ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... 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 ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... leaves of the trees. So absolute was the stillness, that the voices of fishermen, who dwelt among the rocks, could be heard in conversation, although their forms were diminished by distance to the size of a rook. ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... described are Rooks (corvus frugilegus). I have allowed myself to speak of them by their generic or family name of Crow, this being a common country practice. The genus corvus, or Crow, includes the Raven, the Carrion Crow, the Hooded Crow, the Jackdaw, and the Rook. ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... 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 ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... "But 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 is more than ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... 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, whose language has the same structure, ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... high. Electric wires connected it (to use 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 ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 loaded ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... 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 of his learned friends, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... didn't give it a thought that they could be after aught worse than rook-shooting," she would murmur, "for all I heard a sort of a sobbing on the stairs. It was hard on poor old Madam though, never to take any leave of her; but all her life has been hard for that matter, poor innocent old critter. Well, well, I hope it's not a sin to wish 'em happy, spite of that ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... doubt, in actual courting, before the sexes are 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
... lancet spine; and the sea garters. 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
... gaily, and prepared a scathing witticism with which to wither the young girl. But he did not have the pleasure of delivering it to Esperance, who had hidden herself behind her portrait at the foot of the rook. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... bully rook: that Truscott would catch us before we got to Laramie—unless we went ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... 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
... for the 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; but he was dreadfully ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... see her standing straight and pale, High pedestalled on some rook-haunted tower: She has two earrings, silver and vermeil, And eyes like stars that shine in ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 up over his head, letting fall a song upon him, as though it were Heaven's blessing. Then ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... 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 ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... 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 the great ones ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... In the island 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 From Reveille ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... Ch'un exclaimed. "Instead of bracing up your energies now to rook some money out of our venerable senior, you turn your ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... 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
... 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 say, to put ships in afther they wos wrecked on the coast ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 gateway, with the ruined conventual church. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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 and mists still lie on the wooded ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... in the alamedas, loaf, scratch, pry where none should pry, go begging with his sores, trade his own soul for his mother's. His pride becomes insolence, his tragedy hideous revolt, his impassivity swinish, his rock of sufficiency a rook of offence. God in His mercy, or the Devil in his despite, made ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... my wife, or servant Saurea—do your best, swindle us, rook us, I promise you your interests won't suffer, if you accomplish ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... 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. How sad that the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... fell silent, 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 ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... by no 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
... Check! Dinas, check and mate! Thou mad'st it easy, friend. Thou never shouldst Have sacrificed the knight, for thus my rook Escaped, attacking thee. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... 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 from the Tamul language of the peninsula ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... 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 years had but seemed to widen ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... steadfastly refused to keep horses, but the fathers of other dogs were more progressive, and Ellis had had opportunities. He knew how to take the reins, and get up, and give the office; indeed, he had read a handbook on the subject. So he rook the reins and got up, and the ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... cement-mixer 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 was ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... close in front 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. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "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 yon ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... 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, to my ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... 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 ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... 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!' So there we were, I in my red shawl that hangs on the hook there, ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... 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 fill ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... 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 ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... 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 ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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, a reasonably clumsy and serious-looking implement ticketed "As ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... world's 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!' ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... 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; still, ladies ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... 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
... feathered life of a whole 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 and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the shifts 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, except ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... boyhood days. Having married Mary Alabama, the daughter of Dr. P.B. Ruff, he settled on his grandfather's plantation now known as Kinards. While living here his wife died, and a few years afterwards he married Lavinia Elizabeth, the daughter of Dr. William Rook. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... mother 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 the air.—DEWITT ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... 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 ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... 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 to imply wantonness ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 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. He will assure ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... near by. We entered the Castle through the great 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
... 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
... seen at Moreham Mains. But, be that as it 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 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
... like this is sheer libel," he answered presently. "Larssen could rook you for goodness knows what damages if ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... 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
... that evening, for the 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 ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... 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 or position; and, therefore, that he ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... used 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 boundaries of literature as a fine art, and whether ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... house thus secluded, and 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
... eropea to the 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 as a very great variety ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... mysterious knockings, a particular sound of church-bells, or a bird flying into a room, are very grave warnings, and a story of this character comes from near Taunton. 'A farmer riding home from Taunton Market noticed a white rook among the sable flock settling over a field. When he reached home there were symptoms of uneasiness among his cattle, and that night the dogs barked so vociferously that he had to get up and quiet them. In the morning ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... 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, flapped, went up to the right abruptly and ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... 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 of ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... Electric wires connected it (to use 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 gist of the education centred in the exchange, where we were taught to gamble ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in 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 ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... similarity to the Latin ignis or the English "ignite," and from "Un-gi doo-ruk" (big, huge) the transition down to "hunky-dory" is easy. Those who see a sort of complemental relation to each other of linguistic affinity and the conformity in physical characters may infer from "Mikey-doo-rook" (a term of endearment equivalent to "Mavourneen" and used in addressing little children) that the inhabitants within the Polar Circle have something of the Emerald Isle about them. But no, they are not Irish, for when they are about to leave the ship or any other place for their houses they ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... 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 explain the wonderous works Of Heaven to sinful man. Ah! little ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... and, when 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 both before and after the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... 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 ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... A rook, taking a last look at the world before retiring to rest, watching from his leafless bough, saw a mortal spirit defying the ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... 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 crossed ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... 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 ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... difficult to conceive a scene more silent and more desolate. There was no sign of life, and not a sound save the occasional cawing of a rook. Advancing towards the abbey, they passed a pile of buildings that, in the summer, might be screened from sight by the foliage of a group of elms, too scanty at present to veil their desolation. Wide gaps in the roof proved that the vast and dreary stables were no longer used; there were empty ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... 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' hall quietly, ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... 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
... Hadley 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 ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... 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 into ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... sea garters. 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
... 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, but ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... 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 ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... 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. The fine arts, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... 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, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... 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 with ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... 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 up over his head, letting fall a song upon him, as ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... to waste his time in useless decorative work. But what bird was 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 ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... strewn, And morning opening all her doors; The cawing rook, the distant train, The valley with ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... cheat: probably from the thievish disposition of the birds of that name. Also the cant name for a crow used in house-breaking. To rook; to cheat, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... half-a-dozen kitchen chairs scattered about on a linoleum floor. At one end was an electric battery and a big magnet. At the other, a packing case with several pistols and a litter of cartridges upon it. A rook rifle was leaning tip against it, and looking round I saw that the walls were all ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... 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 mounted ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... I have seen other instances of it. No doubt, in actual courting, before the sexes are 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
... 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 ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the pike. There was Rockwood, 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 rough-cut Tennessee ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... 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
... 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
... 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
... further down the 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 ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... wind is 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... 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, she was carefully ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... she had to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster impending. Day after day was made inert with a sense of disaster. She became morbidly sensitive, depressed, apprehensive. It was anguish to her when she saw one rook slowly flapping in the sky. That was a sign of ill-omen. And the foreboding became so black and so powerful in her, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... 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
... tail and wing feathers. 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 vertebrae of the tail are amalgamated to form a single bone ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... 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 ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... 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 purely physical: their position as members of one society has ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... 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 ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... dear, it does seem hard,' said Vea, when we were seated under the rook, 'to leave Patrick in the hands of strangers. And yet, Dr. Blyth is such a good, kind man, I'm sure he won't give ...
— Bluff Crag - or, A Good Word Costs Nothing • Mrs. George Cupples
... the banks of 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 anxiety over ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... 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 ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... means to soothe her man, By labour wearied, through the evening hours. They whirl their life web, humming like a wheel, These airy insects. Birds have ceased to sing, But twitter faintly, settling to their rest; And not a rook's caw rends the placid air. I must begone; but ere I go, will kneel To kiss this ivy—modest earthly type, That would with constant verdure grace her name, As I enshroud her memory with my love! For She has been the blessing that has ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... starling are laid 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 blackbird has planted his nest by the ash-stole, open to every one's ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... keep the heart. Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes 'Tis well to be bereft of promised good, 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 (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 ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... 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 movement, then when ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... 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 by misadventure, being killed by a stray bullet of one of his own men on the ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... 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 ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... cruel old Mentor is not coming to tumble us down over a great rook, like Telemaque in ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... birds; but 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... an inexperienced 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. ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... "No, Simon O'Rook," said Bob Corkey, in that flat contradictions way to which some men are prone; "no, it's only half a mile if ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... Lipsius is airing himself, is he? His Royal Highness has gone to fumigate." McTurk climbed on the railings, where he held forth like the never-wearied rook. ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 and parson. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 then at long intervals ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... 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
... 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 no farther; and therewith came the Queen's summons to her liegemen to come ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 all, She ran to ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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 of diabolical longings ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... there softly 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 magpie ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... 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
... 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
... '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 tea. I says, 'Do ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... light reflected from their 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
... out of my wits. I screamed with all the power of voice I possessed, for I thought the ebon paw of Satan was upon me. The panther then set up the most unearthly scream I had ever heard leaped from the rook, and seemed to make the forest jar at every scream, until he was far away on the lake shore. The clap of thunder awoke my father and mother. The chief, hearing the screams of the panther, seized his ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... gut, forage, levy blackmail, pirate, pickeer|, maraud, lift cattle, poach; smuggle, run; badger*; bail up, hold up, stick up; bunco, bunko, filibuster. swindle, peculate, embezzle; sponge, mulct, rook, bilk, pluck, pigeon, fleece; defraud &c.545; obtain under false pretenses; live by one's wits. rob Peter to pay Paul, borrow of Peter to pay Paul; set a thief to catch a thief. disregard the distinction between meum and tuum[Lat]. [receive stolen goods] fence, launder, launder money. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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" ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... "But 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 is ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... And rook and daw and stare their pinions spread Incontinent; for, so they judged the matter, Some scowling foe stood there, and off ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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
... the 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 ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... 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
... 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 dead horse's blood? ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... 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
... 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 ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... was an expert cement-mixer 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 was ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... servility which they are most appropriately used 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 boundaries of literature as ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 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
... 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 him i' my life. See yo, he'll sit an' clem fro mornin' to neet ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... 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
... 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 ...
— 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
... for the last time before wrapping them up for the messenger, she felt something hard among them. It was a tiny parcel wrapped in a piece of a fine kerchief, tied round with a tress of dark hair, and within, Susan knew by the feeling, a certain chess rook which had been won by Cis when shooting at the butts a week or ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... spirits? Why on 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 at ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 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. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... 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, too, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... 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 something ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... that ripped out from the defenders of the camp. Half of the marksmen fired to the right of the rook, ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... passion of the nocturn, make it the work of an informing genius. As for the gruesome bird, he is unlike all the other ravens of his clan, from the "twa corbies" and "three ravens" of the balladists to Barnaby's rumpled "Grip." Here is no semblance of the cawing rook that haunts ancestral turrets and treads the field of heraldry; no boding phantom of which Tickell sang ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... what I meant by coming aft all salt, like a head sea, making the deck wet after he'd squeegeed 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 ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... as soon as it ceased raining—and, though there were many cabins along the road, few were better than this. At length, after passing the walls of an old church, in the midst of older tombs, we saw the roofless towers of Dunluce Castle, on the sea-shore. It stands on an isolated rook, rising perpendicularly two hundred feet above the sea, and connected with the cliffs of the mainland by a narrow arch of masonry. On the summit of the cliffs were the remains of the buildings where the ancient lords kept their vassals. An old man, who takes care of it ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... walking up and down the floor, stamping his lance as he went. He is the leader we have been waiting for. But it is not always thus that he speaks, Joseph interposed, I have heard him myself say: it is as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as it would be for a cow to calve in a rook's nest. As he went to and fro Nicodemus muttered: there is much to be said for this revision of his words. Jesus wishes to reach the imagination of the poor that know not swords. And he spoke for a long time of the indolence of the ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... 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, ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... runs into riot in a 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
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... 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 quarter of an hour was ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... 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
... burrows by ingeniously-concerted operations. Mr. Bernard[17] has described the interesting way in which the Rook hunts voles or field-mice in Thuringia. His curiosity was excited by the way in which numerous rooks stood about a field cawing loudly. In a few days this was explained: the field was covered with rooks; ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... 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 ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... seems anxious to 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 life of the camp and ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... 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 anxiety over ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... fed you, and thought for you with this head. And you think to steal a march upon a man like me? I see you through and through [I know you like the clock]; I read your thoughts like print. Brodie, you thought, has money, and won't do the job. Therefore, you thought, we must rook him to the heart. And therefore, you put up your idiot cockney. And now you come round, and dictate, and think sure of your Excise? Sure? Are you sure I'll let you pack with a whole skin? By my soul, but I've a mind to ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... 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 light shines full ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... society, openly 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 injured and neglected ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... morning meal, Was wont to love their song, when lingering morn Streak'd o'er the chilly landskip the dim light, And thro' the open'd lattice hung my head To view the snow-drop's bud: 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 ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... 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 aged individual rooks or an authenticated tradition ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... insecurely fastened, and "put up" Blicks's ready ruffians to the more dangerous work. In his various disguises, and under his many names, he found his way into those upper circles of "fast" society, where animals turn into birds, where a wolf becomes a rook, and a lamb a pigeon. Rich spendthrifts who affected male society asked him to their houses, and Mr. Anthony Croftonbury, Captain James Craven, and Mr. Lionel Crofton were names remembered, sometimes with pleasure, oftener with regret, by many a broken man of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... she talked to me of the new song she had 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
... Paez 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, in spite of inexpressible suffering. ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... 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 ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... 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, a distance ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... and beauty in the scene; so much of brightness and mirth in the sunny landscape; such blithesome music in the songs of the summer birds; such freedom in the rapid flight of the rook, careering overhead; so much of life and joyousness in all; that, when the boy raised his aching eyes, and looked about, the thought instinctively occurred to him, that this was not a time for death; that Rose could surely never die when humbler things were all so glad and gay; that graves were for ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... 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 these people out ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 my extreme astonishment, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... done thousands of years ago. Speckled 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 ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... the hedge and upon the "shore" of the ditch, 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 fill a ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... 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. ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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 ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... vojo, strato. "-stead," rodo. roar : (winds and waves) mugxi. 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; regulo. ruler : registo; ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... 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 Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... 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 Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... 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
... 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 I pull. If ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... his meal Prepared, the children each made tidy; she With smiling comfort means to soothe her man, By labour wearied, through the evening hours. They whirl their life web, humming like a wheel, These airy insects. Birds have ceased to sing, But twitter faintly, settling to their rest; And not a rook's caw rends the placid air. I must begone; but ere I go, will kneel To kiss this ivy—modest earthly type, That would with constant verdure grace her name, As I enshroud her memory with my love! For She has been the blessing that has nerved ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... simple child. 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 ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... 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 ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... 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 hating everything." ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... 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 used to feed, and they have taken to hunting for the eggs of partridge and pheasant, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... among other 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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 ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... and of stone are nothing in number to the gods in the air. You breathe not a breath without inhaling, you touch not a leaf without ruffling a spirit. There are gods of heaven, and gods of earth; gods of sea and of land; gods of peace and of war; gods of rook and of fell; gods of ghosts and of thieves; of singers and dancers; of lean men and of house-thatchers. Gods glance in the eyes of birds, and sparkle in the crests of the waves; gods merrily swing in the boughs of the trees, and merrily sing in the brook. Gods are ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Noronha we 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; ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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
... I met Will Blanchard an hour agone. Gwaine in the dispensary, he was. The li'l bwoy's queer—no gert ill, but a bit of a tisseck on the lungs. He got playin' 'bout, busy as a rook, in the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... 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, and came ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... 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 near to a heronry, and do you know they ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... land 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 ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
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