"Grouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... How soothing is a pipe or a cigar to a wearied sportsman, on his return to his inn from the moors! As he sits quietly smoking, he thinks of the absent friends whom he will gratify with presents of grouse; and, in a state of perfect contentment with himself and all the world, he determines to give all his game away. Full of such kindly feelings, he retires to bed; but, alas, with day-light, when the effect of the tobacco has subsided, the old leaven of selfishness ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... to shoot grouse on a moor he had taken in Mull for the season; the house and estate are well known to all of us; I will disguise the moor under the pseudonym or nom de guerre of "Othello". He was awaited at "Othello" on the evening of the eleventh; for on the one ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... to do in the "early days" of Iowa. It was the customary annual round-up of the pioneers, a time of haunting, sweetly-sad recollections, and all the speeches were filled with allusions to the days when deer on the hills and grouse in the meadows gave zest to ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... was, out on the great grouse moors, which the country folk called Harthover Fell—[Footnote: FELL is the name given, in parts of England, to moors, or stretches of high, open country of any sort.] heather and bog and rock, stretching away and up, up ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... on" by friends he had made in the army from country house to country house; he was made the guest of honor at city banquets, with the Duke of Rutland rode after the Belvoir hounds, and in Scotland made mild excursions after grouse. But after six months of convalescence he was off again, this time to the hinterland of Ashanti, on the west coast of Africa, where he went in the interests of a syndicate to investigate a concession for working ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... not try the Highlands? There must be lots of traffic there in the shape of sheep, grouse, and Cockney tourists, not to mention salmon and other et ceteras. Couldn't we tip them a railway somewhere in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... The Grouse Disease Commission has found a recognised period in the fluctuations of the number of those game birds. During a cycle of sixty years there recur the good year, the very good year, the record year, the bad disease year, the recovery, the average, and the good average. The round is said ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... wild-fowl sang them to him, In the moorlands and the fen-lands, In the melancholy marshes; Chetowaik, the plover, sang them, Mahng, the loon, the wild-goose, Wawa, The blue heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, And the grouse, the Mushkodasa!" ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... I learn, put the wind up the War Cabinet, and great things may result. All my pleasure spoilt, however, by breaking a tooth on a pellet in a Ritz grouse. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... him; "what are we to do about the main point—the grouse-shooting? Besides, remember there is another ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... There had been rain during the night and, though it had ceased, a wild wet wind was blowing hard from the north-west. The yellowing beech trees twisted and swung their grey arms in the gale. Hats flew down the wind like driven grouse; Sir Thomas's voice, in the middle of the covert, came to the riders assembled at the cross roads on the outskirts of the wood in gusts, fitful indeed, but not so fitful that Nora, on the distrained foxy mare, was not able to gauge to a nicety the state of his ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... a cat on the mother grouse Brooding her young in the wind-bent weeds, Or listens to heed with a start of greed The bittern booming ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... have begun to drag me back. I'll own I've never liked to let myself dwell on that memory. It wasn't a good thing because it had a trick of taking me back in a fiendish way to the little chap with his heart bursting in the railway carriage—and the betrayal feeling. It's morbid to let yourself grouse over what can't be undone. So you faded away. But when I danced past you somehow I knew I'd come on SOMETHING. It made me restless. I couldn't keep my eyes away decently. Then all at once I KNEW! I couldn't tell you what the effect was. There you were again—I was as much obliged to tell you ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... otters, minks and such like. The birds which are natural to the country are turkeys like ours, swans, geese of three sorts, ducks, teals, cranes, herons, bitterns, two sorts of partridges, four sorts of heath fowls, grouse or pheasants. The river fish is like that of Europe, viz., carp, sturgeon, salmon, pike, perch, roach, eel, etc. In the salt waters are found codfish, haddock, herring and so forth, also abundance of oysters ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... Progne Widow-bird. See also on the Vidua axillaris, ibid. vol. ii. 1860, p. 211. On the polygamy of the Capercailzie and Great Bustard, see L. Lloyd, 'Game Birds of Sweden,' 1867, pp. 19, and 182. Montagu and Selby speak of the Black Grouse as polygamous and of the Red Grouse as monogamous.) I have been assured by Mr. Jenner Weir and by others, that it is somewhat common for three starlings to frequent the same nest; but whether this is a case of polygamy or polyandry ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... down beside the coals of the cooking fire and twirled the spit. Upon the spit were three grouse and half a dozen quail. The huge coffee pot was sending out a nose-tingling aroma. Biscuits were baking ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... clothes are copied from the English, though they will claim in the same breath that their tailors are the best in the world. For wines they claim to be unsurpassed, producing the finest; yet the wines on their tables are French or bear French labels. Game is served—a grouse or perhaps a hare, and then a vast roast, possibly venison, or beef, and there are vegetables, followed by a salad of some kind. Then comes the dessert—an iced cream, cakes, nuts, raisins, cheese, and coffee with brandy, and then cigars and vermuth or ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... left at woodcocks." For luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling over a lowland moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard. I like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered covers, when I know not what may rise—a woodcock, an odd pheasant, a snipe in the out-lying ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... will be a great deal of trouble,—a great deal, indeed; but I shall take it. I mean you to be very intimate with Mr. Kennedy, and to shoot his grouse, and to stalk his deer, and to help to keep him in progress as a liberal member of Parliament. I am quite prepared to admit, as a friend, that he would go back ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... the world. His story found its way into one of the poultry papers, and was copied thence into a daily news-sheet as a matter of general interest. A lady wrote from the North of Scotland recounting a similar episode which she had witnessed as occurring between a stoat and a blind grouse. Somehow a lie seems so much less reprehensible when one can ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... to the solemnity of a church organ. It is altogether so strange a sound that nothing but a phonograph could convey any adequate idea of it. It is a thing to be heard. No pen can properly describe it. After a long march, and when you are preparing to relieve the brute of his load, he begins to grouse. When he is about to start in the morning he grouses. If you hit him, he grouses; if you pat his neck gently, he grouses; if you offer him something to eat, he grouses; and if you twist his tail, he makes the same extraordinary noise. The camel evidently has not a large vocabulary, and he ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... "If you grouse any more, I'll empty the can of peaches on your pillow, so shut up!" commanded the mistress of the ceremonies. "A beano's a beano, and ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... fizzle, and splashed into the fox's eyes, blinding him. He started backwards with a cry of pain, and sat still for some minutes, rocking himself to and fro. When he was a little better he rose and walked down a road till he met a grouse, who stopped and ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... jays will be sure to carry off a great many of the nuts before they fall; then, after the wind has rattled out what remain, there are the mice, the chipmunks, the red squirrels, the raccoons, the grouse, to say nothing of the boys and the pigs, to come in for their share; so I will forestall events a little: I will cut off the burrs when they have matured, and a few days of this dry October weather will cause every ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... more alone with the young man, did. Why this strange indifference to the very occupations that used to be the chief interest of his life? He would not go out after the deer; the velvet would be on their horns yet. He would not go out after the grouse: what was the use of disturbing them before ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... winter season. Its steep edges, covered with an impenetrable arborescent growth, enclosed a great treeless plateau, a "lande." We used to get on to this lande by walking up the bed of a rivulet, and once on it we had perfect massacres of winged game, especially of that sort of gray grouse called ptarmigan by the English. It was these birds' pairing season. They never flew away, and when we killed one the other would ruffle up its feathers in a fury and fly pecking at our legs. The wooded sides of the island must have been full ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... said to me gently, 'In winter, Matrona, I told you my story, But yet there was more. Our forests were endless, Our lakes wild and lonely, Our people were savage; By cruelty lived we: By snaring the wood-grouse, 380 By slaying the bears:— You must kill or you perish! I've told you of Barin Shalashnikov, also Of how we were robbed By the villainous German, And then of the prison, The exile, the mines. My heart was like stone, I grew wild and ferocious. ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... way—adventures which the soldier endures in silence as part of his everyday life. On this occasion, however, the episode was all our own, and had a sporting flavour in it which made it dramatic. I know now the feeling of tense expectation with which the driven grouse whirrs onwards towards the butt. I have been behind the butt before now, and it is only poetic justice that I should see the matter from the other point of view. As we approached Ronchi we could see shrapnel breaking over the road in front of us, but we had not yet realised ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... grouse and complain about the inconveniences of life here in the United States should learn some lessons from the civilian populations of our Allies—Britain, and China, and Russia—and of all the lands occupied by our ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... was very cold, the grouse and black-cocks would come into the trees near the house, and Randal and Jean would put out porridge for them to eat. And the great white swans floated in from the frozen lochs on the hills, and gathered round open reaches ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... sheer accident. Walking along like this with my head down I always seem to come upon two or three dead hares or now and then a partridge or grouse. Natural mortality, you understand. Well, what could be more humane than to stuff them in my pockets and take ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... me explain what you long to know, how it is that I date from London. Yes, my friend, it is even so: Craigenputtock now stands solitary in the wilderness, with none but an old woman and foolish grouse-destroyers in it; and we for the last ten weeks, after a fierce universal disruption, are here with our household gods. Censure not; I came to London for the best of all reasons,—to seek bread and work. So it literally stands; and so do I literally ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... wayfarers. His nerves evidently on keen edge, he seemed to fear surprise of some unpleasant sort. Each crackling twig, as he passed through the thickets, each rustling of a frightened rabbit as it scuttled from his path, each whir of startled grouse, or sudden call of nesting king-bird, made him pause cautiously until he had quite satisfied himself that it meant nothing to be feared. He was ever carefully alert ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... of Cape Diamond and in the thickets of the Coteau Sainte Genevieve, more especially when scurvy or the dearth of provisions rendered indispensable the use of fresh meats. We should have heard of grouse, woodcock, hares, beavers, foxes, caribou, bears, &c., at that period, as the probable denizens of the mounts and valleys of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... three delectable things enough, which I take pains to remember, that the reader may not go away wholly unsatisfied from the Barmecide feast to which I have bidden him,— a red mullet, a plate of mushrooms, exquisitely stewed, and part of a ptarmigan, a bird of the same family as the grouse, but feeding high up towards the summit of the Scotch mountains, whence it gets a wild delicacy of flavor very superior to that of the artificially nurtured English game-fowl. All the other dainties have vanished from my memory as completely ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... outlet of the lake would fill with fish overnight. The streams were full of trout. Mother Elle knew how to make fish-hooks of bone, bows and arrows, ropes, and baskets of bark, how to weave osiers, how to cure bruises and cuts, how to trap the wild hares, grouse and plover and cook them over an open fire. The children found plover's eggs and the eggs of other wild fowl. They raised pulse, leeks, onions and turnips in a little garden patch. They gathered strawberries, cranberries, crowberries, wild ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... some aid might be near, and though no less than twenty men, with their dogs, were looking for me, I never heard a sound, except the rush of the waterfall and the sighing of the night wind, and once or twice the startling of the grouse in the heather. It was sublime indeed,—a never-to-be-forgotten presentation of stern, serene realities. At last came the signs of day,—the gradual clearing and breaking up; some faint sounds from I know not what; the little flies, too, arose ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... property, the whole of which, after smouldering for a season, has since burst into a violent conflagration, which he can neither diminish nor control, would be willing to let it at a comparatively low rental to a London Sportsman sufficient novice in grouse-shooting not to be surprised at picking up his birds already roasted in the heather. As at the end of a day's trudging in the blinding heat of a Sahara through smoking covers, accompanied by a powerful steam fire-engine, he will probably discover ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... day there came A lovely youth of mystic name: He took a lodging in the house, And fell a-dodging snipe and grouse, For, oh! that mild scholastic one Let ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... after this meeting neither Hilda Wade nor I saw anything more of the Le Geyts. They left town for Scotland at the end of the season; and when all the grouse had been duly slaughtered and all the salmon duly hooked, they went on to Leicestershire for the opening of fox-hunting; so it was not till after Christmas that they returned to Campden Hill. Meanwhile, I had spoken to Dr. Sebastian about Miss Wade, and on my recommendation he had found her ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... eat the insects that would devour their foliage. All day long, the little beaks of the birds are busy. The dear little rose-breasted gross-beak carefully examines the potato plants, and picks off the beetles, the martins destroy weevil, the quail and grouse family eats the chinchbug, the woodpeckers dig the worms from the trees, and many other birds eat the flies and gnats and mosquitoes that torment us so. No flying or crawling creature escapes their ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... entrance of the bay. Several of our gentlemen paid their visits to the serjeant, by whom they were received with great civility; and Captain Clerke sent him two bottles of rum, which he understood would be the most acceptable present he could make him, and received in return some fine fowls of the grouse kind, and twenty trouts. Our sportsmen met with but bad success; for though the bay swarmed with flocks of ducks of various kinds, and Greenland pigeons, yet they were so shy that they could not come within ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... with mantles of eternal snow, towered above the deep-sunk valley, when, one morning, Geoffrey Thurston limped painfully out of a redwood forest of British Columbia. The boom of a hidden river set the pine sprays quivering. A blue grouse was drumming deliriously on the top of a stately fir, and the morning sun drew clean, healing odors from balsam ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... wagon in length,—cypress with twisted and gnarled knots red against the rank green; mosses swinging from branch to branch in snaky coils wherever the clouds settled and rested; islands studding the sea like emerald gems; grouse drumming their spring song through the dark underbrush; sea-mew and Mother Carey's chickens screaming and clacking overhead; the snowy summits red as wine in the sunset glow—all made up an April scene long cherished by ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... mile distant from the spot on which those sleepers rested, there grew another small bush, and under its sheltering boughs, in the snuggest conceivable hole, nestled a grouse, or prairie hen, also sound asleep, with its head lost in feathers, and its whole rotund aspect conveying the idea of extreme comfort and good living. Now, we do not draw the reader's attention to that bird because of its rarity, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... something under thirty years of age, and the Earl was four years his senior. The Earl was a married man, with a family, a wife who also liked poor George, an enormous income, and a place in Scotland at which George always spent the three first weeks of grouse-shooting. The Earl was a kindly, good-humoured, liberal, but yet hard man of the world. He knew George Hotspur well, and would on no account lend him a shilling. He would not have given his friend money to extricate him from any difficulty. But he forgave the ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... sort of duck, almost like that mentioned at Kerguelen's Land; another sort which none of us knew; and some of the black seapyes, with red bills, which we found at Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand. Some of the people who went on shore, killed a grouse, a snipe, and some plover. But though, upon the whole, the water-fowls were pretty numerous, especially the ducks and geese, which frequent the shores, they were so shy, that it was scarcely possible to get within shot; so that we obtained a very small supply of them as refreshment. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... ahead of her, she saw a ruffed grouse wandering in the trail. These, and a single tiny grey bird with a dreary note interminably repeated, were the only living things she saw except here and there a summer-battered butterfly of the Vanessa tribe ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... in the stream is the 'float,' which is to the prospector the one shining signal to be followed. Timber-line is passed till the forests below look like dank banks of moss. Cloud-line is passed till the clouds lie underneath in grey lakes and pools. A 'fool hen' or mountain grouse comes out and bobbles her head at the passing packtrain. A whistling marmot pops up from the rocks and pierces the stillness. Redwings and waxbills pick crumbs from every camp meal; and occasionally a bald-headed eagle utters a lonely raucous ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... fruit, salads, and oysters, not to mention wild-duck. He entertains no sympathy with the cannibal, who judges the flavour of his enemy improved by temporary commitment to a subterranean larder; yet, to be sure, he keeps his grouse and his venison till it approaches the ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... invitations to country houses, for cricket matches, archery meetings, and the like; nor did he even make it clear where his address would be, except that he would be with a friend in Scotland when grouse-shooting began. ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... easy vein, The favorite picture of the year; The grouse upon her lord's domain— The ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... that, at Vincennes, seven sportsmen had been out all day, before we arrived, to procure game for us, and were much disappointed at not being able to get us any prairie hens, which are a humble imitation of grouse, though Americans are pleased to consider them better than that best of birds; but "comparisons are odious," and the prairie-hens are very praiseworthy and good in their way. We had, however, abundance of venison and quails, and the same fare met us here, with large libations ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... his lordship, who was no sportsman, and who detested Scotland, grouse moors, deer forests, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... was this; I find I can get leave for two months this summer. Now suppose I was to take him to Marchmont's grouse shooting place in Scotland, and about among the Highlands and Islands. Perhaps the pleasure of that excursion would make up for the being carried off by an awful guardian, and those scrambles might bring him to the old footing ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... each dealing with a kind of animal. Sometimes an animal genus is given two chapters, for instance domestic dogs, and wild dogs. One grouse: the phrase "well-known" occurs over forty times. Would the "well-known" fact be well-known to the book's ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... parliament for the little borough of Dearish, most patriotically discharges his duty by pairing off—visits the classic grounds of Ascot, Epsom, Newmarket, or Goodwood, or traverses the moors of Scotland and Ireland in pursuit of grouse. But once a year they indulge their filial virtues in a visit to the old squire. The old squire, we are sorry to say, has grown of late years queer and snappish, and does not look on this visit quite as gratefully as he should. "If they would but come," he says, "in a quiet way, as I used to ride ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... I caught myself idly counting the darns in my table-napkin. They were—if I remember—fourteen, and all exquisitely stitched. The dinner, on the other hand, would have tempted men far less hungry than we—grilled steaks of salmon, a roast haunch of venison, grouse, a milk-pudding, and, for dessert, the dish of apples already mentioned; the meats washed down with one wine only, but that wine was claret, and beautifully sound. I should mention that we were served by a grey-haired retainer, almost stone deaf, ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... second of Breed's time was spent on the meat trail. An occasional blue grouse or snowshoe hare was the largest game he found. That the coyotes were faring as poorly he knew from the signs he crossed each day in the hills. He found the tracks of dog coyotes many miles from their dens and always the signs showed that they ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... Murre, and some other sea birds, have but one egg. The Turkey Vulture, Mourning Dove, Hummingbird, Whip-poor-will, and Nighthawk lay two. Various Thrushes, such as the {24} Robin, Veery, and Wood Thrush, deposit from three to five, four being the most usual number. Wild Ducks, Turkeys, and Grouse range from eight to a dozen or more; while Quails sometimes lay as many ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... fat aldermen down for a speech (Grouse! Grouse! What a dreary bird!) With five fair minutes allotted to each, But never a moment for him ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... to the O.C. and Kilbride: "I'm glad to be able to report a decided improvement in that man Hardy's condition. His pulse is stronger, his appetite is increasing and—he's beginning to grouse. That old ruffian of a farrier-corporal, McCullough, was right, begad!—he knew the man better than I did. As a general rule I'm inclined to be rather sceptical of such drastic experiments, but ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... Clem!" said Darsie lightly. A moment later, with relenting candour, she added: "You'll like it a lot better than being examined by a Cambridge coach! So don't grouse, my dear; we've both got the work we like best—come down to lunch, and let's see what mother has provided for ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the trays platters of silver and porcelain (whereof mention hath been made) containing all that lip and tongue gratify of the meat of muttons in fry and Kata-grouse and pigeon-poults and quails and things that fly of every kind and dye which hungry men can long to espy, and Yusuf saw inscribed upon the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... something quite different, quite different. The councilor himself would have had no objection to maintaining himself by going about in a coat of lamb-skin and shooting hares and snipes and golden plovers and grouse and haunches of venison and wild boars. No, the state of nature really was like a ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... essay admits that there may be extenuating circumstances. If the autograph collector comes bearing gifts one may smile upon his suit. If for example he accompanies his request for an autograph with 'several brace of grouse, or a salmon of noble proportions, or rare old books bound by Derome, or a service of Worcester china with the square mark,' he may hope for success. The essayist opines that such gifts 'will not be returned by a celebrity who respects himself.' 'They bless him who gives and him who takes much ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... what you're told off to do," said the other occupant of the dug-out, "why grouse ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... said, "haven't you found out that Milly was worth all the money in the Bank of England? And then to grouse because you bain't out of debt for her! Hell!" said William White, "you needn't think I wouldn't be off the bargain to-morrow and gladly pay you all the money twice over ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... not cover his legs. They remain unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... habitation of a magnificent bird—the Sage Cock. He may well be called the King of the grouse tribe. When stalking erect through the sage, he looks as large as a good-sized wild turkey—his average length being, indeed, about thirty-two inches, and that of the hen two feet. They differ somewhat, according to the season of the year. The prevailing colour is that of a yellowish-brown ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... reflection, to account for such a degree of felicity. I was young, and the brisk mountain air exhilarated me. I walked out every day on the heather, which I loved as if my father and mother had been a brace of grouse. Then there was the steady occupation of painting a big foreground study from nature, and the necessary camp work that would have kept morbid ideas at a distance if any such had been likely to trouble me. As for the solitude, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Pohyola are pursuing; Look again with keener vision." Thereupon wild Lemminkainen Looked again and spake as follows: "In the distance seems a forest, In the south appears an island, Aspen-groves with falcons laden, Alders laden with the wood-grouse." Spake the ancient Wainamoinen: "Surely thou art speaking falsehood; 'Tis no forest in the distance, Neither aspen, birch, nor alders, Laden with the grouse, or falcon; I am fearful that Pohyola Follows ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... convinced I saw the house-keeper wrapping up a black grouse this morning. Frederica, my dear, don't ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... his brother went to see an execution. "We had a full view of Mr. Waistcott as he went to the gallows with a white cockade in his hat." Not to be wanting in the ordinary courtesies of the time, Selwyn's correspondent presently remarks, as one nowadays would do of a day's grouse-shooting: "I hope you have had good sport at the Place de Greve, to make up for losing the sight of so notorious a villain as Lady Harrington's porter. Mais laisons la ce discours triste, and let us talk of the living and lively world." Selwyn made his ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... privacy and parody their spring reunions and rivalries; some of them sing a little after a silence of months. The robins, bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows, crows, all sport, and call, and behave in a manner suggestive of spring. The cock grouse drums in the woods as he did in April and May. The pigeons reappear, and the wild geese and ducks. The witch-hazel blooms. The trout spawns. The streams are again full. The air is humid, and the moisture rises in ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... most resolute of the party. He never lost his head. At times we others raved a little, or laughed a little, or cried a little, but the Halfbreed remained cool and grim. Ceaselessly he foraged for food. Once he found a nest of grouse eggs, and, breaking them open, discovered they contained half-formed birds. We ate them just as they were, crunched them between our swollen gums. Snails, too, we ate sometimes, and grass roots and moss which we scraped ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... every man's leisure, and some leisure for every man's work. Even the leisure classes are in a measure compelled to work, sometimes as a relief from ennui, but in most cases to gratify an instinct which they cannot resist. Some go foxhunting in the English counties, others grouse-shooting on the Scotch hills, while many wander away every summer to climb mountains in Switzerland. Hence the boating, running, cricketing, and athletic sports of the public schools, in which our young men at the same time so healthfully cultivate their strength both of mind and body. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... edge of it. Beyond the box was a table and a chair, and it was the burden of this table that made his pulse jump quickest. Marette had not forgotten that he might grow hungry. It was laid sumptuously, with a plate for one, but with food for half a dozen. There were a brace of roasted grouse, brown as nuts; a cold roast of moose meat or beef; a dish piled high with golden potato salad; olives, pickles, an open can of cherries, a loaf of bread, butter, cheese—and one of Kedsty's treasured thermos bottles, which undoubtedly ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... starving population with food," he reminded her genially. "We sent about four hundred brace of grouse to market, not to speak of the salmon. We had some very fair golf, ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at her feet. It was a white grouse and it remained cowering on the ground. Sheen looked up and she saw a hawk above. And when she looked round she saw a man coming across the bog. The hawk flew towards him and lighted on ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... eat and drink." Accordingly he shouted to his eunuchs and women an order to serve food, and they set before them a tray containing birds of every king that walk and fly and in nests increase and multiply, such as sand-grouse and quails and pigeon-poults and lambs and fatted geese and fried poultry and other dishes of all sorts and colours. The Princess put out her hand to the tray and began to eat and feed the Wazir with her fair finger-tips and kiss him on the mouth. They ate till they had enough and washed their ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... point. Like the other islands it was quite destitute of trees, but the low bush was luxuriantly dense, and filled, they were told, with herds of reindeer and musk-oxen. Myriads of wild-fowl—from the lordly swan to the twittering sandpiper—swarmed among its sedgy lakelets, while grouse and ptarmigan were to be seen in large flocks on its uplands. The land was clothed in mosses and grasses of the richest green, and decked ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... by on silent wing. Black birds with orange heads and throats and splashed with scarlet on their wings, greeted them at the foot of the mountain among the reeds which grew along the stream they were following. Deer broke from the willow copse and bounded away, while grouse rose on whirring wings from under the horses' hoofs as they emerged upon the plain where the wild cry of the curlew rang clear and sharp on the morning. They were free and breathed deep of the spirit of freedom; listened ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... "No—that's grouse, not glow-worms. You see, you are reduced to July, and it's July still. Do take my advice, Mr. Pellew, and leave Natural History alone. Nobody will ever know you know nothing about it, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... as he spoke to gather up, not the fruit, but a dozen fresh partridge eggs from the inner shade of a thick tuft of grass and herbs that grew beside a fallen tree. Catharine's voice and sudden movements had startled the partridge [FN: The Canadian partridge is a species of grouse, larger than the English or French partridge. We refer our young readers to the finely arranged specimens in the British Museum, (open to the public,) where they may discover "Louis's partridge."] from her nest, ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... heroes, the birds, to the sons of heroes, to the porphyrion, the pelican, the spoon-bill, the redbreast, the grouse, the peacock, the horned-owl, the teal, the bittern, the heron, the stormy ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... gazed upon the burnished brace Of plump, ruffed grouse he showed with pride, Angelic grief was in her face: "How could you do it, dear?" she sighed. "The poor, pathetic moveless wings!" The songs all hushed—"Oh, cruel shame!" Said he, "The partridge never sings," Said she, "The sin is ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... with here during the Hecla's stay were principally reindeer, bears, foxes, kittiwakes, glaucus and ivory gulls, tern, eider-ducks, and a few grouse. Looms and rotges were numerous in the offing. Seventy reindeer were killed, chiefly very small, and, until the middle of August, not in good condition. They were usually met with in herds of from six or ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... had never heard before. Chuck! chuck! chuck! It came at regular intervals for a while, then stopped and began again. What could it be? It was not the noise of a woodpecker, nor that which a beaver makes with its tail. Chuck! chuck! chuck! It was not the clucking of a grouse, though perhaps more like that than anything else, but different, somehow, in quality. Chuck! chuck! chuck! I think we all knew in our hearts that it had something to ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... that, Mr. Siward; and when all the men are waiting for you to start out after grouse perhaps I may take that moment to whisper: 'May ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... nine or ten o'clock; but here you must imitate those who would thrive, and 'rise at five:' while the exertion is compensated by your having to bundle off to your chamber at 9.30 p. M. You may long at breakfast for your hot tea, and if a Scotchman, for your grouse pie or devilled kidneys; but you will be obliged to make up with the simpler refreshment of bread and milk, with the accompaniment of stewed Normandy pippins. You may have been wont to spend your days in a fever of business, in a breathless hurry and worry ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... soon be the shooting season, and then, if the weather permit, he will find occupation enough in the pursuit and destruction of the partridges and pheasants: we have no grouse, or he might have been similarly occupied at this moment, instead of lying under the acacia-tree pulling poor Dash's ears. But he says it is dull work shooting alone; he must have a friend or ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Then I got a Burke's peerage and told MacGregor who he was and had him study up on his family history and get acquainted with his sister, Lady Mary, and his younger brother, the Honorable Cecil Something-or-other—in particular he was not to forget to rave about the grouse shooting in Scotland." ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... deer, which are celebrated as being the largest and finest specimens of venison that roam the forests of any country, and are only to be found in the Rocky mountains; on another, wild turkeys, and then mountain grouse and prairie chickens, helped to complete the load. When thus provided for, it is no wonder that Kit's workmen loved their employment, and labored with ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... yellow or of broken colors; the campanula, the wild honeysuckle, lupines—not yet quite in bloom—the sweetbrier and increasing quantities of the wild rose gave life to the always changing scene. Wild game of every sort was unspeakably abundant—deer and turkey in every bottom, thousands of grouse on the hills, vast flocks of snipe and plover, even numbers of the green parrakeets then so numerous along that latitude. The streams abounded in game fish. All ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... the solitary curlew, the saucy burr of the grouse, the screech of the owl, the croaking of the raven, the flight of the magpie, the slowly flying heron, the noisy cock, the hungry seagull, the shrill note of the woodpecker, the sportive ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... the conclusion he could not "find himself." He asked me to keep near him, and this I did as well as I could; but even then, three times during the course of ten days he lost himself completely in the tumultuous upheavals and canons of that badly mixed region. Another, an old grouse-hunter, walked twice in a circle within the confines of a thick swamp about two miles square. On the other hand, many exhibit almost marvelous skill in striking a bee-line for their objective point, and can always tell ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... was scarcely a day that the old gentleman's servant did not knock at their door, bearing a present of game. The second time he came with some fine larks; next was a superb grouse; then woodcock again. Curiosity strove with astonishment ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the western Pyrenees. And beyond, to the south-east, in early spring, the Pyrenean snows gleam bright, white clouds above the clouds. As one turns southward, the mountains break down into brown heather-hills, like Scottish grouse moors. The two nearest, and seemingly highest, are the famous Rhune and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath and crags, hundreds of unburied bones. For those great hills, skilfully fortified ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... its duties, my lord. Noblesse oblige, and so forth. You understand?' Margate didn't in the least, but he went and proposed quite properly, and was rejected rather more decidedly than his fellows. Then he went down into Perthshire, and missed his grouse, and lost his salmon, with a comfortable consciousness of having discharged ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... in this one I wore my fingers sore picking up stones for these stone walls; in this I planted corn and potatoes with my brothers. In these maple woods I helped make sugar in the spring; in these I killed my first ruffed grouse. In this field I did my first ploughing, with thoughts of an academy in a neighboring town at the end of every furrow. In this one I burned the dry and decayed stumps in the April days, with my younger brother, and a spark ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... when the bracken grew red and golden and the rowan berries grew red as Deirdre's lips, her keen eyes would see the stags grazing high up among the grey boulders of the mist-crowned mountains, and would warn the brothers of the sport awaiting them. The crow of the grouse, the belling of stags, the bark of the hill-fox, the swish of the great wings of the golden eagle, the song of birds, the lilt of running water, the complaining of the wind through the birches—all these things made music to Deirdre, to whom ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... can find here, the dark red of beets, the yellow of carrots, and the blue of cabbages. The association of colors was very artistic, and even the line of mutton carcasses overhead, with each a brace of grouse or half a dozen quail in its embrace, and flanked with long sides of beef at the four ends of the line, was picturesque, though the sight of the carnage at the provision-stores here would always be dreadful to an Altrurian; in the great markets it is intolerable. ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... certain expression on the face of Vavasor, which that experienced man of the world never certainly intended to be so surprised, only at the moment he was annoyed to see the absorption of Hester's listening; she seemed to have eyes for no one but the man who shot tigers as Vavasor would have shot grouse. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Office about drafts! The 92nd carried on—had to carry on; they fell to quarter strength—still they were the Gordons and they carried on, just as if they counted a thousand rifles in their ranks. Now, I am quite prepared to do that to-day—if that is the policy. If that were the policy; not one grouse or grumble should ever cross my lips. But that is not the policy. Press and People believe a Division is a unit made up in scientific proportions of different branches and numbering a certain ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... you will come early, I will tell you how OLD-man made the world over after the water made its war on the land, scaring all the animal-people and the bird-people. I will also tell you how he made the first man and the first woman and who they were. But now the grouse is fast asleep; nobody is stirring but those who were made to see in the dark, like the owl ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... bring back Nina and Eileen. . . . You don't mind, do you, Phil? I've a busy day to-morrow. . . . There's Scotch over there—you know where things are. Ring if you have a sudden desire for anything funny like peacock feathers on toast. There's cold grouse somewhere underground if you're going to be an owl. . . . And don't feed that cat on the rugs. . ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... before coming to his dignity, in hunting, fishing, or bartering provisions with the Indians. Thus did Poutrincourt's table groan beneath all the luxuries of the winter forest,—flesh of moose, caribou, and deer, beaver, otter, and hare, bears and wild-cats; with ducks, geese, grouse, and plover; sturgeon, too, and trout, and fish innumerable, speared through the ice of the Equille, or drawn from the depths of the neighboring bay. "And," says Lescarbot, in closing his bill of fare, "whatever our gourmands at home may think, we found as good cheer at Port ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... are the cock and hen of the wild bird called in Scotland the capercailzie. The ryper is the ptarmigan. The jerper is of the grouse species.—Lloyd's "Field Sports of ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... life interest as provided, realize upon the property, and travel," said Mr. Richard, helping himself to potted grouse. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke |
