"Rookery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Elizabeth first ascended the throne, crouching and repenting of having written his famous excommunication against all female sovereignty; or pulling down the monasteries, from the axiom that when the rookery was destroyed, the rooks would never return; when we find his recent apologist admiring, while he apologises for, some extraordinary proofs of Machiavelian politics, an impenetrable mystery seems to hang over the conduct of men who profess to be guided by the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Bow Creek, walking in a go-as-you-please way through lovely wooded and rocky scenery until we reached a water-mill. We had seen several herons on our way, a rather scarce bird, and we were told there was a breeding-place for them at Sharpham, together with a very large rookery. We passed Cornworthy, where there was an old church and a prehistoric camp, and some ruins of a priory of Augustinian nuns which existed there in the fourteenth century; but we had no time to explore them, and hastened on to Dittisham, where we regained the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... their cottages whitewashed, do they? What'll they ask for next, I wonder? Do they think we're to be content at last with one and a-half per cent, upon the fee-simple value of our estates, I should like to know? Why, some of the places this writer-fellow talks about are on my own property in The Rookery—"one of the most noisome court-yards in all London," he actually calls it. Whitewash their cottages, indeed! The lazy improvident creatures! They'll be asking us to put down encaustic tiles upon the floors next, and to paper their walls with Japanese ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... pale-green eggs with dark-brown spots belonged to a rook's nest in the elm-tree at the bottom of the garden. There's a curious story about those rooks down there, for they have not been there long. There is an old rookery belonging to the Rectory close by our house; and one day the rooks from there came to our elm-tree. It was in the spring. At last they came frequently, and chattered, and cawed, and flew round and round, as if they did not know what to do about ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... brutalities of Henry VIII — three or four young Englishmen — survived there, with Milnes Gaskell acting as Prior. The August sun was warm; the calm of the Abbey was ten times secular; not a discordant sound — hardly a sound of any sort except the cawing of the ancient rookery at sunset — broke the stillness; and, after the excitement of the last month, one felt a palpable haze of peace brooding over the Edge and the Welsh Marches. Since the reign of Pterspis, nothing had greatly changed; nothing except the monks. Lying on the turf the ground littered with newspapers, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... being her friends, and she spending her days with books and simple work, sitting chiefly at the large window from whence she could see the park, and the avenue where the company came and went, and on days when there was naught else stirring, watch the rookery with its colony of rooks flying to and fro quarrelling or sitting in judgment on affairs of state, settling their big nests, and marrying and giving ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fewer attractions, for it is all Past and no Future. Probably, therefore, it would not suit the American, whose imagination does not work so easily backward as forward, and who prefers to build his own nest rather than settle in anybody else's rookery. Perhaps the American deceives himself when he says he wants repose; what he wants is perpetual activity and change; his peace of mind is postponed until he can get it in his own way. It is in feeling that he is a part of growth and not of decay. Foreigners are fond ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... their forces, each day seeing some fresh arrivals to fight for the occupation of the rookery, they were a constant source of amusement to the snow-bound party, who, not being able to stir far from the doorway of the "castle," had nothing hardly to occupy their attention save the ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... in the valley, elms grew round His moated mansion, and the pleasant sound Of woodland birds that loud at day-break sing, With the first cuckoos that proclaim the spring, Flock'd round his dwelling; and his kitchen smoke, That from the towering rookery upward broke, Of joyful import to the poor hard by, Stream'd a glad sign of hospitality; So fancy pictures; but its day is o'er; The moat remains, the dwelling is no more! Its name denotes its melancholy fall, For village children call the ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... easily induced to forsake the trees on which they have been bred, and which they frequently revisit after the breeding season is over. This is shown in Hampton-Court Park, where there is an extensive rookery amongst the fine lime-trees, and where a barbarous and unnecessary custom prevails of shooting the young rooks. As many as a hundred dozen of them have been killed in one season, and yet the rooks build in the avenue, though there is a corresponding avenue close by, in Bushy Park, which they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... in 1759, the Rookery, near Dorking, noted for its beauties of hill, dale, wood, and water; he sold it in 1768. He translated Gerardin, De la Composition des Paysages, 12mo. 1783, to which he prefixed a preface, being, chiefly, remarks on what the gardens of the Greeks and Romans ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... they can run on them. And there, 250 miles north of the Aleutian Islands, we can make motor trucks pay for themselves in a single year by the force they add in effective transportation. We have a seal rookery 13 or 14 miles from the village of St. Paul Island. We have not been able to kill seals there, because we could not get skins down to the village. Now a couple of motor trucks bring them down without the least difficulty, and in order to get the road there they carried down materials to build the ...
— Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... to the Cuthbert Rookery, but it isn't the season for that. It's a hard trip anyway, through small salt-water lakes and little overgrown creeks where you have to drag your skiff most of the way. And you've got to carry all the water you drink and you won't find that ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... 138]. "Till their foule noyse doth all the ayre infest." —Drayton probably stands alone among English poets in disliking the music of the rookery. ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... shown on ordinary maps. Though the island is, for some unexplained reason, under the jurisdiction of the British North Borneo Company, it is a part of the Sulu Archipelago and belongs to the United States. Baguian is famed throughout those seas as a rookery for the giant tortoise—testudo elephantopus. Toward nightfall the mammoth chelonians—some of them weigh upward of half a ton—come ashore in great numbers to lay their eggs in nests made in the edge of the jungle ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... a rookery does not affect all people alike. Some who, ordinarily dwelling in cities, suffer from lack of bird neighbours, would regard the deliberate destruction of a rookery as an act of vandalism. A few, as a matter of fact, actually ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... my family at this time affords an example of the truth of the old proverb, that "ae evil never comes its lane;" being no sooner quit of our dread concerning the burning, than we were doomed by Providence to undergo the disaster of the rookery of our hen-house. I believe I have mentioned the number of our stock—to wit, a cock and seven hens, eight in all; but I neglected, on account of their size, or somehow overlooked, the two bantams, than which two more neat ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... hand on her arm as she was hurrying on without looking at him, 'will you meet me in the Rookery at twelve o'clock? I must speak to you, and we shall be in privacy there. I cannot speak to you in ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the land thereto appertaining, situated in Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix, the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring. The funeral or death's-head ring was ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... draw when one was four years old—a doorway in the middle, with a nice semicircular top, and three windows on either side; two stories above with seven windows each, and a pretty dormered roof, with twisted brick chimneys, and a rookery behind it; also a walled garden, and a green oval grass-plot between it and the road. It seems to me that everywhere you go in England you find these houses, and, I dare say, people like ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... them was found dead in any of the shrubberies, her orders were that it was to be given a prompt and respectable burial. Jays and magpies, however, she could not abide, nor crows and rooks, and a curious story is told of a rookery which these birds tried to establish near the house. Every year they decided to build in a particular tree, and every year they were shot or otherwise driven away. At last Lady Holland died, and the gardeners gladly laid aside their guns. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... The scene of GOODY TWO-SHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among the thaumata thaumastotata even of the present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of the "whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's beard," scared by the tremendous voice, with which this monster answered the challenge ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the sweet warblers of the Songster Family,—the Nightingales, the Thrushes, the Mocking-Birds, the Robins; they differ in the greater or less perfection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... returning home, we saw a gentleman, who was very ill, sitting under a shady tree at the corner of the rookery. Though ill, he began to joke with Little Margery, and said, laughing, "So, Goody Two-Shoes, they tell me you are a cunning little baggage; pray can you tell me what I shall do to get well?" "Yes, sir," says ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... the water outside the reef. Every now and then one of the animals would rise in the shallows and crawl up on the beach, which evidently was a recognized place of resort for its kind. A small rocky island which protected us to some extent from the north-westerly wind carried a ringed-penguin rookery. These birds were of migratory habit and might be expected to leave us before the winter set in fully, but in the meantime they were within our reach. These attractions, however, were overridden by the fact that the beach was open to the attack of wind and ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... call English attention to the necessity of looking after the national defences; and it had a powerful effect. Westward of Dorking there is fine scenery, amid which is the little house known as the "Rookery," where Malthus the political economist was born in 1766. Wotton Church stands alongside the road near by, almost hid by aged trees—a building of various dates, with a porch and stunted tower. Here John Evelyn was taught when a child, and the graves of his ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... haled him up for judgment," cried the stranger with much amusement. "It is as though a rookery sat in judgment upon a falcon. I warrant that you have found it easier to judge than to punish. Let me tell you, father Abbot, that this standeth not aright. When powers such as these were given to the like of you, they were ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which cannot be compensated, a certain messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situate in —— Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several families, and known as 'the Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix, the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring. The funeral or death's-head ring was buried ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... line of surf tumbling on the barrier reef a mile away seemed almost within stone-throw. A gentle breeze swayed the fronds of the coco-palms above us, and already the countless thousands of sea birds, whose "rookery" was on two small islets within the reef and near the village, were awake, and filling the air with their clamour as they, like us, prepared to start off for their ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... smiled and said: "Good morning, Kelly." The second, similarly meeting with an officer of the law, scowled upward, and said: "Do it again, and I'll break you." The first person came out of the uptown palace like a fairy from a grotto; the second emerged from the downtown rookery like some prehistoric monster ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... shacks that shelter the city's poor. Outlawry is not far distant. "These tenements must go." Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage upon the subsidence of a wave of reform. Many a rookery, officially abolished, will be found still tenanted, and yielding not one income, but two, one for the owner and another for the police. The property represented by enterprises paying low wages, working men for long hours or under unhealthful conditions, or employing children, is almost ripe for ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop. . . . From my seat I could look down on Thornfield: the gray and battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale below me; its woods and dark rookery rose against the west. I lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... he had walked a long way through the dark green forest, he saw a little hut standing under the pine trees. There was no smoke coming from the chimney, but there was such a chattering in the hut you could hear it far away. It was like coming near a rookery at evening, or disturbing a lot of starlings. And as the old man came slowly nearer to the hut, he thought he saw little faces looking at him through the window and peeping through the door. He could not be sure, because they were gone so quickly. And all the time the chattering went on louder and ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... compelled to listen to the foulest language, and hear fighting and quarrelling, and alas, alas, not only to hear it in the adjoining rooms, but witness it within their own. For over two years they have been delivered from the power of the cursed drink. The old rookery is gone, and now they have a comfortably-furnished home. Their children give evidence of being truly converted, and have a lively gratitude for their father's salvation. One boy of eight said, last Christmas Day, "I ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... firs. It was easy to know when the birds had paired, as a couple of rooks could then be often seen perched gravely side by side upon an old nest in the midst of leafless boughs, deliberating about its repair. There were some poplars near a part of the rookery, and when the nests were fully occupied with young the old birds frequently alighted on the very top of an adjacent poplar. The slender brush-like tip of the tree bent with their weight, curving over like a whip, to ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... native soil, native land. habitat, range, stamping ground; haunt, hangout; biosphere; environment, ecological niche. nest, nidus, snuggery[obs3]; arbor, bower, &c. 191; lair, den, cave, hole, hiding place, cell, sanctum sanctorum[Lat], aerie, eyrie, eyry[obs3], rookery, hive; covert, resort, retreat, perch, roost; nidification; kala jagah[obs3]. bivouac, camp, encampment, cantonment, castrametation[obs3]; barrack, casemate[obs3], casern[obs3]. tent &c. (covering) 223; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... with jaunty step and absorbed inquiring gaze in the shallow pools. Hermit crabs of several species and sizes were scuttling about searching for convenient shells in which to deposit their naturally homeless and tender tails. Overhead there was a sort of sea-rookery, the trees being tenanted by numerous gannets, frigate birds, and terns—the first gazing with a stupid yet angry air; the last—one beautiful little snow-white species in particular—hovering only a few feet above the sketchers' heads, while their large black eyes scanned the drawings with ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... nose hole narrowed quickly into a cleft, a narrow cleft which pierced into the bowl of the skull. Shann proceeded with caution, pausing every few steps. There came a murmur rising now and again to a shriek, issuing, he guessed, from the clak-clak rookery above. And the pound of sea waves was also a vibration carrying through the rock. He was listening for something else, at the same time testing the ill-smelling air for that betraying ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... time for night hawks to be in bed, for the keepers will be astir in a little, and it looks suspicious to be seen leaving the pheasant coverts at four in the morning. The hands of the watch point to the hour, and as though waiting for the word, the whole rookery rises in a black mass and drifts westward ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... and broke his leg, as he was decorating a theatre in the room which had been the old chapel of the castle, the people of the country thought it was a judgment of Heaven upon him. In his rage for improvement the fellow dared anything. Without my orders he cut down an old rookery which was sacred in the country, and had a prophecy regarding it, stating, 'When the rook-wood shall fall, down goes Hackton Hall.' The rooks went over and colonised Tiptoff Woods, which lay near us (and be hanged to them!), and Cornichon ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Home, we saw a Gentleman, who was very ill, sitting under a shady Tree at the Corner of his Rookery. Though ill, he began to joke with Little Margery, and said, laughingly, so, Goody Two-Shoes, they tell me you are a cunning little Baggage; pray, can you tell me what I shall do to get well? ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... Allan, interrupting her,—"my mind is now constant and calm.—But for you, young lord," said he, turning to Lord Menteith, "my eye has sought you through fields of battle, where Highlanders and Lowlanders lay strewed as thick as ever the rooks sat on those ancient trees," pointing to a rookery which was seen from the window—"my eye sought you, but your corpse was not there—my eye sought you among a train of unresisting and disarmed captives, drawn up within the bounding walls of an ancient ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... one spring morning that he had been wakened by the clamour of the rooks with which he had been familiar ever since he was a boy, and her reply was that an estate equal in value to his own and possessing a bigger rookery had been offered him for less money by one-third than he had thrown away. Unfortunately it is not in management or morality that we crave companionship. It is in religion and in the deepest emotions that we thirst for it. Gradually he became wretched, and ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... subject for pamphlets, poems, plays, songs, and medical treatises, by Ned Ward, George Colman the older, Bickham, Dr. Hugh Smith, &c. Nothing now remains of them but the original chalybeate spring, which is still preserved in an obscure nook, amidst a poverty-stricken and squalid rookery of misery and vice."—George Daniel's Merrie England in the Olden Time, vol. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... forming a wild chorus, in which screams and bellowings seemed to vie for supremacy; indeed words cannot adequately describe this terrific disturbance. As I expected, the depraved Whig Journalist, with characteristic mental tortuosity, has asserted that the sounds proceeded from a rookery in the adjoining wood, aided by the braying of the turf-man's donkey. But an enlightened public will see through this paltry subterfuge. Rooks and donkeys! Pooh! There cannot be a doubt but that the noises were the preparatory war-whoops of this ferocious and sanguinary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... observer be extended ever so little beyond the charmed circle of that garden, and nearly all around is ugliness supreme! For this is a garden on the roof of an old house; the grand river is the Thames, alive with the shipping of its world-wide commerce, and all around lies that interminable forest of rookery chimneys, where wild ungainly forms tell of the insane and vain efforts of man to cope with smoke; where wild beasts—in the form of cats—hold their nightly revels, imitating the yells of agonised infants, filling the dreams of sleepers with ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... glass, was to be seen in a window of what is now the buttery. A window, on which the whole family arms was emblazoned, had been removed to the residence of the actual proprietor of the manor. Another relic of the ancient manor of the Washingtons was a rookery in a venerable grove hard by. The rooks, those staunch adherents to old family abodes, still hovered and cawed about their hereditary nests. In the pavement of the parish church we were shown a stone slab, bearing effigies, on plates of ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... was melancholy and silence and the massed defiance of ever-impending ruin. Storm, and avalanche, and the bitter snap of frost had wrought their havoc year by year, till an uncrippled branch was a rare distinction. The very saplings, of stunted growth, bore the air of thieves reared in a rookery of crime. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Occasionally dead twigs, either dislodged from the nests or broken off by the motions of the old birds, came rustling down. One or two nests that had been blown out strewed the sward with half a bushel of dead sticks. After the rookery the path passed a lonely dairy, where the polished brazen vessels in the skilling glittered like gold in the sunshine. Farther on came wide open meadows with numerous oak-trees scattered in the midst—the outposts of the great wood at hand. The elms were flourishing ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... the matkas seek the shore to drop their pups aland, The great man-seal haul out of the sea, a-roaring, band by band; And when the first September gales have slaked their rutting-wrath, The great man-seal haul back to the sea and no man knows their path. Then dark they lie and stark they lie — rookery, dune, and floe, And the Northern Lights come down o' nights to dance with the houseless snow; And God Who clears the grounding berg and steers the grinding floe, He hears the cry of the little kit-fox and the wind along the snow. But since our women must walk gay ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... societies, and build, as it were, cities over our heads; they evidently distinguish, that the danger is greater when a man is armed with a gun. Every one has seen this, who in the spring of the year has walked under a rookery with a gun in his hand: the inhabitants of the trees rise on their wings, and scream to the unfledged young to shrink into their nests from the sight of the enemy. The vulgar observing this circumstance so uniformly to occur, assert that ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... borrowings, I am afraid my honor would irrevocably be lost. I therefore prefer, since in either case lose it I must, to lose it and eat. But the birds are now beginning to flock together; and I must begone, to the pigeon-house: the rookery.' ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... From the water's edge up the steps to the palaces and temples and houses at the top, the terraces swarmed with thousands of people, and the talk and mirthless laughter rose and fell like the continuous clamour from a guillemot rookery. ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... me tell you, fellows, it's going to be a tough job for our firemen to save any part of the old building, because the blaze has got such a good start I reckon old Philip will have to put up a really modern house in place of the old rookery." ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... engaging ruffian of the feathered world, the rook. It has no more music in its voice than a tin kettle; but what jollier sound is there on a late February morning than the splendid hubbub of a rookery when the slovenly nests are being built in the naked and swaying branches of the elms? Betsy Trotwood was angry with David Copperfield's father because he called his house Blunderstone Rookery. "Rookery, indeed!" she said. It is almost the only point of disagreement I ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the fading leaves. 'They don't come to me,' he said softly again; with a tiny smile on his old face. 'It's that old medieval Craik: with a face like a last year's rookery!' And again he sat, with head a little sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without, now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... stolen from the neighbouring beach. Overhead, numerous gannets, frigate-birds, and terns, rest on the trees; and the wood, from the many nests and from the smell of the atmosphere, might be called a sea-rookery. The gannets, sitting on their rude nests, gaze at one with a stupid yet angry air. The noddies, as their name expresses, are silly little creatures. But there is one charming bird: it is a small, snow-white tern, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... goes together. Just you plant some orty Queen In a rookery, in her kidhood, and then tell her to keep clean, Wash 'er face, and mend 'er garments,—wich they're mostly sewed-up rags,— In six months she'd be a scare-crow, 'ands like ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... call my memory back from this garrulous rookery of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my unmolested hermitage, I cast about for ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Bedford Row, in a rookery of apartment houses in narrow streets, there lives a colony of ballet girls and chorus girls who are employed at the lighter theatres of the Strand. They are a noisy, merry, reckless, harmless race, free ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... several small islands covered with rank grass, interspersed in different parts of the river. They were inhabited by myriads of frogs, whose noise was more hoarse and stunning than ever proceeded from any rookery in Christendom. As they went up the river the canoe men spoke to their priests, who were invisible to them, in a most sepulchral tone of voice, and were answered in the same unearthly and doleful manner. These sounds formed their ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... years passed and brought their changes. In the manly youth who came forward as his name was called in the academy, and stood modestly at the desk to receive his diploma, few would have recognized the little ragamuffin who had dragged bundles of fire-wood to the rookery in the alley, and carried Uncle Pasquale's dinner-pail to the dump. But the audience gathered to witness the commencement exercises knew it all, and greeted him with a hearty welcome that recalled his early struggles and ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... question, relating to the roof of this bad tenement house, I answer frankly: Yes, no roof is better. This poor woman, working at starvation-wages, is furnishing from twelve to twenty per cent interest on the money invested in this miserable old rookery, whose heartless landlord, like the unjust judge of the Gospels, fears not God and regards not man. If we condemn this disease-breeding death-trap, it will not be a question of this woman having "no roof" over her head, but she may have a decent roof, with ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... other came swiftly after her, and Sofia swung in panic and stumbled up the steps. There were others up above, two to her certain knowledge, possibly many more of Victor's creatures; but if only she could find some sort of refuge in the uppermost fastnesses of the rookery, perhaps ... ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... splashing and churning the water, reminding one of a crowd of miniature surf-bathers. We followed the files of birds marching inland, along the course of a tumbling stream, until at an elevation of some five hundred feet, on a flattish piece of ground, a huge rookery opened out—acres and acres of birds ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... to branch and feed, literally drive along the woods like a torrent. They feed upon the fruits which at this time they procure at the middle heights of the forests, and do not venture upon the open grounds. The nests are far more closely packed together than in any rookery, and are built one above another, from the height of twenty feet to the top of the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... tall oaks and beeches, that crowns a terrace walk, just on the skirts of the garden, is an ancient rookery, which is one of the most important provinces in the squire's rural domains. The old gentleman sets great store by his rooks, and will not suffer one of them to be killed, in consequence of which ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the initials of which are carved on the beam in the kitchen. Externally, there is much more to commend it to our acceptance. Remains of a triangular piece of ground, with a few elm-trees, still survive as "the rookery," where Mr. Tupman met with his mishap, and to our delight there is "the pond," not indeed covered with ice, as on Mr. Pickwick's memorable adventure, but crowded with water-lilies on its surface; its banks surrounded ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... over the site of what was formerly the Royal Mews, a building of very ancient foundation; and a rookery of obscure and ill-famed lanes and alleys on the west and north of St. Martin's Church, popularly known as the Bermudas, and afterwards the Caribbean Islands. In the midst of the mews stood a small and remarkable ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... was decided to send a little party in search, in hopes of fetching him in and finding out more about the alleged shooting. The party found Case without any trouble. He sat singing to himself and swinging his legs from the table in the abandoned rookery, the half-emptied bottle on one side and a "monkey" of spring water on the other, scornful alike of danger or demands, but indomitably courteous. The party took a drink with him as promptly invited, but found him implacably bent on holding the position. Not until argument and whiskey both were ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... said the little girl, pointing upwards to the large rookery close by. whence came a noise marvellously like that made by the field-workers. 'But I'm afraid the blackbirds and thrushes can't like it. I do so wonder what they ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... minute after withdrawing the key the adventurer stood at alert attention; but the heavy silence of that sinister old rookery sang in his ears untroubled by ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... he was leading us to our friends, we went on as fast as we could walk. Our path led us under some cliffs which were literally crowded with penguins and young albatrosses, or mollimauks. There was a regular encampment or rookery of them, extending for five or six hundred yards in length, and from one to two dozen in breadth. The nests of the albatrosses were nearly a foot high, and of a cup-like form. Feathers were just beginning to spread on the backs and wings ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... were incalculable. He would never believe in one again. His disbelief in woman rose even to the rookery in the high elms close at hand. That she, Rachel, whom he had always regarded as the first among women, should be dazzled by the empty glamour of rank, now that her fortune put such marriages within her reach, was incredible. He should have repudiated such an idea with scorn, if he ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... of cook-shop we ate a hearty meal, with plenty of very bad wine. Then we went where, manifestly, arrangements had been made for our lodging, in a seven-story rookery, such as I had never entered and had hardly seen from outside. Its entrance was from the Subura and opened near the middle of one of the long sides of the courtyard, the pavement of which was very uneven from irregular sinking and its many shaped stones much worn. Out in it, at almost equal ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... was never seen before; Excellencies from the four winds taking wing towards Friedrich; and talking and insinuating, and fencing and fugling, after their sort, in that Silesian Camp of his, the centre being there. A universal rookery of Diplomatists;—whose loud cackle and cawing is now as if gone mad to us; their work wholly fallen putrescent and avoidable, dead to all creatures. And secondly, in the train of that, there ensued a universal European War, the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... through an abominable rookery, and were walking down a narrow alley, seemingly deserted. Yet I was sensible that eyes were furtively watching us from behind barred windows, and I fancied that I heard whispers—mere guttural sounds, that conveyed nothing to the ear, save, perhaps, a warning that we ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... of his fancy acquaintance, Jackson the pugilist, together with pictures of Harrow School and the College at Cambridge, at which he was educated. The bedchamber goes by the name of the Book Cell, from its vicinity to the Rookery which, since time immemorial, has maintained possession of a solemn grove adjacent to the chapel. This venerable community afforded me much food for speculation during my residence in this apartment. In the morning I used to hear them gradually ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... widened into a pool which was still further enlarged by means of a dam, forming a small lake of the clearest water. This lake fed a mill-race lower down. The farmyard and rick-barton were a little way up the narrow valley, on one side of which there was a rookery. The house itself was built in the pure Elizabethan style; with mullioned windows, and innumerable gables roofed with tiles. Nor was it wanting in the traditions of the olden time. This fine old place was the homestead of a large ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... a horror. There is something not without grandeur in the thought of starvation on an open mountain or in a wide wood, and your bones lying there to bleach in the pure sun and rain; but a back garret in a rookery, and the other starvers in the room insisting on keeping the window shut—anything to ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... that you, too, in all likelihood, will adorn an equally suitable branch, my Lord of the thieves' rookery," ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... field—feebly, as if they had barely strength to reach the trees in the opposite hedge. Extending their wings they float slowly, and every now and then the body undulates along its entire length. Rooks are building—they fly and feed now in pairs; the rookery is alive with them. To the steeple the jackdaws have returned and fly round and round; now one holds his wings rigid and slides down at an angle of sixty degrees at a breakneck pace, as if about to dash himself in fragments on the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... it. I gazed with delight on the windmill, and thought it lucky that it should be in motion, at the moment I passed by; and entering the dear green lane, which led directly to the village, the sound of the well-known rookery gave that sentimental tinge to the varying sensations of my active soul, which only served to heighten the lustre of the luxuriant scenery. But, spying, as I advanced, the spire, peeping over the withered tops of the aged ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... wind howling without went crashing through the old trees of the old rookery round about the old church. The long bedroom windows went thump thumping; the moon could be seen through them lighting up the graves with their ghastly shadows; the yew-tree, cut into the shape of a bird, looked particularly dreadful, and bent and swayed as if it would peck something off that other ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... office of the American Express Company, and the monumental Field Building, by Richardson, with what Mr. Schuyler calls its grim utilitarianism of expression; and the same praise might, perhaps, be extended to the Auditorium, the Owings Building, the Rookery, and some others. In non-commercial architecture Chicago may point with some pride to its City Hall, its University, its libraries, the admirable Chicago Club (the old Art Institute), and the new Art Institute ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the provisions being nearly exhausted, it was necessary to make as much haste as possible. On January 8th the Babel Isles were marked down, and named "because of the confusion of noises made by the geese, shags, penguins, gulls, and sooty petrels." Anyone who has camped near a rookery of sooty petrels is aware that they are quite capable of maintaining a sufficiently "babelish confusion"—the phrase is Camden's—without ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... was best in the Valley. Below the ranch houses came what was known as "the English Colony," a scattering of young bachelors playing at ranching, whose rendezvous was the pretty Swiss chalet known as "the Rookery," where a wonderful little young-old lady with red wig and hectic flush dispensed lavish hospitality and canned music and old port behind the eminent respectability of a stool-pigeon in the person of a card-loving husband. The lady's husband called himself ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... therefore, was crowded to its full capacity, and a thing that never before had happened in the chronicles of the old frontier post was now a matter of course. Even "Bedlam," the ramshackle, two-story frame rookery, once sacred to the bachelor element, had now two families quartered therein, and one of these comprised the wife, maiden sister, and three children of Captain Forrest, of the cavalry,—"refugees from Robinson." For several ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... homo—rooms in which we would probably receive a mild shock and be compelled to rebuild our entire structure of theories on the subject of the helplessness, uncomfortableness, and general miserableness of that specimen known as bachelor. To be sure, Steve Loveland was fortunate in the selection of his rookery, but that might be called an outcome of his genius—a genius with which bachelors are not supposed to be blessed. At first glance, one who had no such gift for situation would not have considered such a spot favorable for the construction of a home—if this ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... of all its inhabitants. The child gathers flowers in the meadow, or runs up and down a green bank, or looks for birds' nests every spring day. The boy and girl hear the lark in the field and the linnet in the wood, as a matter of course: they walk beside the growing corn, and pass beneath the rookery, and feel nothing of its being a privilege. The sailor beholds the stars every bright night of the year, and is familiar with the thousand hues of the changing sea. The soldier on his march sees the sun rise and set on mountain and valley, plain and forest. The citizen, pent up in the centre of a ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... radar and loran operator," said Soames. "I explained that you wanted to see some crevasses from the air, and I'd be wandering around looking for them on the way to the rookery. He will check on us ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... downcast eyes, turning slowly and indifferently as if it mattered little where he walked. The merry blackbirds in the hay field adjoining the garden called to each other continuously, and from a hidden rookery came the voice of the dusky settlers, which is, perhaps, the saddest sound in all nature's harmonies. But the Jesuit resolutely refused to listen. Once, however, he stopped and stood motionless for some seconds, with his head turned slightly to meet the distant cry; but he never raised his eyes, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... creatures and their kind—Jefferies walking the wood, or tracking the brook, or mapping out the big tree—is some one to be heeded with gratitude. He is the Scandalous Chronicler of the warren and the rookery, the newsmonger and intelligencer of creeping things, and things that fly, and things that run; and his confidences, unique in quality and type, have the novelty and force of personal revelations. In dealing with men and women, he surrendered most of his advantage and lost the best part of his charm. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of spring, Skua gulls and penguins had become plentiful and in answer to the professor's entreaties the boys finally stopped the sledge near a rookery of the latter, in which the queer birds were busy over the nests. These nests are rough piles of stones, on which the eggs are laid. Soon the chickens—fuzzy little brown creatures—appear, and there is a lot of fuss in the rookery; the penguins getting their families mixed and fighting ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... reply, and Jarvis sliding his arm within that of his companion, led him out of the gardens. They took the direction of Wandsworth, keeping by the river bank, and Jarvis made a halt at a tumbledown rookery of a waterside tavern—the "Feathers." Vane was so overwhelmed by the prospect of a possible tragedy that he scarcely noticed the dirt, the squalidness, the hot and foetid air and the evil-looking fellows who stared at them when he and ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... There was no rookery in or near the village, but a large flock of rooks were always to be seen feeding and sunning themselves in some level meadows near the river. It struck me one day as a very fine sight, when an old bird, who looked larger and blacker and ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... The Rookery of Emperor Penguins under the Cliffs of the Great Ice Barrier: looking east from Cape Crozier. xlii From a sketch ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... gentleman, and tell him he'll find me and Mr. Pickwick in the rookery. Show the gentleman the way ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... retaining his bedroom and dining-room and the use of the front door. Jemima, too, had gone. She wanted, so she had told her master the day he left with Kate, to take a holiday and visit some of her people who lived down by the Marsh Market in an old rookery near the Falls, and would come back when he sent for her; but Todd had settled all that the morning of his arrival, the moment he caught sight of her ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... same color as the last but the markings more inclined to zigzag lines. Size 2.10 x 1.40. Data.—Heron Lake, Minn., May 26, 1885. Nest of wet sedge stalks and rubbish placed in a bunch of standing sedge in shallow water; at least five thousand birds in rookery. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... proposed to erect a post and leave a cylinder containing an account of their doings, so that the chain of records might be completed. After a landing had [Page 53] been made with some difficulty, a spot was chosen in the center of the penguin rookery on a small cliff overlooking the sea, and here the post was set up and anchored with numerous boulders. In spite of every effort to mark the place, at a few hundred yards it was almost impossible to distinguish it; but ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... H.S. Clark, 34 Rookery Bldg., Chicago, Ill., a camera with rising front, swing back, 3 double holders, tripod and carrying case, and a scroll saw, with nickel-plated tilting table and emery wheel ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... the wag, who would laugh at such cookery!" Thus, from his perch, did I hear a black crow[4] Caw angrily out, while the rest of the rookery Opened their bills and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... says, 'were my delight, irrespective of their contents. I was already marked out for the life of a student, yet little that was in the books I read seemed to find its way into my mind.' He found time for much besides reading. He delighted in riding, in shooting rooks in the Hall rookery, and in fishing for trout with clumsy tackle and worm. Passion for country sports was followed by passion for natural history in the ordinary shape of the boy's fancy for collecting insects and observing birds. He fell in with White's Natural ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... does not affect all people alike. Some who, ordinarily dwelling in cities, suffer from lack of bird neighbours, would regard the deliberate destruction of a rookery as an act of vandalism. A few, as a matter of fact, actually set about establishing such a colony where none previously existed, an ambition that may generally be accomplished without extreme difficulty. All that is needed is to transplant a nest or two of ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her people-men. Near evening we entered one of their tents. The women set up a cry, 'Kiomi! Kiomi!' like a rising rookery. Their eyes and teeth made such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool. The strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a word, rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all round,—not musical, but catching and incessant,—gave ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... muffin-bell, have something in them, but not much. They will bear dilating upon with the utmost license of inventive prose. All things are not alike conductors to the imagination. A learned Scotch professor found fault with an ingenious friend and arch-critic for cultivating a rookery on his grounds: the professor declared "he would as soon think of encouraging a froggery." This was barbarous as it was senseless. Strange that a country that has produced the Scotch Novels and Gertrude of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various |
