"Bullfinch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chinese lacquer bed for Wee Toi that I devised a birdcage to go with them, a square cage of gilt wires, with a black lacquer pointed canopy top, with little gilt bells at the pointed eaves. The cage is fixed to a shallow lacquer tray, and is the nicest place you can imagine for a whistling bullfinch to live in. I suppose I could have a Persian cat on a gorgeous cushion to complete the place, but I can't admit cats into the room. I plan gorgeous cushions for other people's "little people," when they happen ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... often, but still they do come. The rarest bird seems to be the bullfinch. I have only seen bullfinches three or four times in three seasons, and then only a pair. Now, this is worthy a note, as illustrating what I have often ventured to say about the habitat of birds being so often local, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... maintained her defensive barrier of silence. The bullfinch lazily filled in the interval with an air from Iphigenie en Tauride. Egbert recognised it immediately, because it was the only air the bullfinch whistled, and he had come to them with the reputation for whistling it. Both Egbert and Lady Anne would have preferred ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... cover is a spray of columbine, the petals of which, pink and blue, are each worked separately in needlepoint lace stitch, and afterwards tacked on to a central rib. The stalks and leaves of this spray are also worked in needlepoint, and on the top sits a bullfinch, worked in many colours in the same way, but fastened down close to the satin all round. In the corners are a beetle, a nondescript flower, a bud, and a butterfly with coloured wings in needlepoint, with replicas of them closely appliques ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... remarkable as more than a dozen species could be named which have yielded hybrids with the canary; but hardly any of these, with the exception of the siskin (Fringilla spinus), have reproduced their own kind. Even the bullfinch (Loxia pyrrhula) has bred as frequently with the canary, though belonging to a distinct genus, as with its own species.[359] With respect to the skylark (Alauda arvensis), I have heard of birds living ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... a Bullfinch, who could boast More years and wisdom than the most, Entreated, opening wide his beak, A moment's liberty to speak; And, silence publicly enjoined, Delivered briefly ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... and whether it was a pretty place? Whether he was a hunting man, and whether he liked women to hunt? (in which case she was prepared to say that she adored hunting)—but Mr. Foker expressing his opinion against sporting females, and pointing out Lady Bullfinch, who happened to pass by, as a horse-godmother, whom he had seen at cover with a cigar in her face, Blanche too expressed her detestation of the sports of the field, and said it would make her shudder to think of ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... running—they're running, Go hark! One fence and we're out of the park; Sit down in your saddles and race at the brook, Then smash at the bullfinch; no time for a look; Leave cravens and skirters to dangle behind; He's away for the moors in the teeth of the wind, And they're running—they're running, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it had come to its full colours. In about a year it began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hemp- seed. Such influence has food ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White |
