"Cackling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overheard by Ferragus, Jules asked himself whether it were not wisest to conclude the arrangement he had come to make with the old woman in the crowded antechamber. A hen, which descended cackling from a loft, roused him from this inward meditation. He came to a resolution, and followed Ida's mother into the inner room, whither they were accompanied by the wheezy pug, a personage otherwise mute, who ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... of its wild ancestors. As much can be said of the creolla fowl of the pampas; and some observations of mine on the habits of this variety will perhaps serve to throw light on a vexed question of Natural History—namely, the cackling of the hen after laying, an instinct which has been described as "useless" and "disadvantageous." In fowls that live unconfined, and which are allowed to lay where they like, the instinct, as we know it, is certainly detrimental, since egg-eating dogs and pigs soon learn the cause of the outcry, ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... in which the short-faced gentleman might have spent his summer holidays after Sir Roger's death. It stands behind a high iron gate, surmounted by a handsome coat of arms; and before it there lies a pleasant patch of greensward, with a pond and a colony of cackling geese, which craned their necks and screamed at me ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... frightened chickens cackling, and hogs grunting in their near-by pen, the scene was one that those boys would not forget in ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... up here?" chirped a voice in a jubilant, cackling laugh that drew Dellarme's attention to his immediate surroundings, and he saw Grandfather Fragini coming up to join him on the crest. He slid back on his stomach below the sky-line and held up ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... go on the stage: I know I could act." At this, her father abruptly gave utterance to a feeble cackling of laughter; and when Alice, surprised and a little offended, pressed him for his reason, he tried to evade, saying, "Nothing, dearie. I just thought of something." But she persisted until he had ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... serving-maids dared to creep up to watch the doings in the banqueting-hall? But there was no one in the gallery, and she bent down, peering through the stucco balustrade into the hall below. Her attention was arrested by a cackling snigger behind her—a horrid, mocking, wheezy titter in the shadow of the overhanging ornamentation of the banqueting-hall roof, which came low down over the little gallery. She turned quickly and saw the ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... please," replied the Greek, who, as Frewen spoke, saw that the boat was deeply-laden with fruit; and the cackling of fowls and sudden squeal of a pig convinced him that everything was right. And then, in a few minutes, Frewen and Raymond clambered up the side and walked quickly aft to where Ryan stood ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... portioned off for poultry. In this the working staff of a dozen hens were doing their duty, which, on that first night of the "brown angels' visit," consisted of silent slumber, when all at once the hens and the new hands were aroused by a clamorous cackling, which speedily stopped. It sounded like a hen falling in a bad dream, then regaining her perch to go to sleep again. But next morning the body of one of these highly esteemed branches of the egg-plant ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... she should sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be No better a musician than ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... walls of the rambling buildings. On the fourth side, facing the sea, the dusty road wound east toward Megara. Here, by the gate, were gathered a rustic company: brown-faced village lads and lasses, toothless graybeards, cackling old wives. Above the barred gate swung a festoon of ivy, whilst from within the court came the squeaking of pipes, the tuning of citharas, and shouted orders—signs of a mighty bustling. Then even while the company grew, a half-stripped courier ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... absence to make another effort; and, to my joy, I actually succeeded in reaching the doorstep, over which I tumbled into a pool of muddy water that lay before my father's cottage door. Ah, how vividly I remember the horror of my poor mother when she found me sweltering in the mud amongst a group of cackling ducks, and the tenderness with which she stripped off my dripping clothes and washed my dirty little body! From this time forth my rambles became more frequent and, as I grew older, more distant, until at last I had wandered far and near on the shore ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... fowl; but in his sleep he suddenly awoke from a dreadful nightmare, during the horrors of which that cackling creature glared upon him in the enormity of his sin. Next morning he was up before the chickens' elderly friends, the cocks, began to crow, and ere they had completed their morning song, well—the stock of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... took the whole family out for a walk in the fields, Medio Pollito would hop away by himself and hide among the corn. Many an anxious minute his brothers and sisters had looking for him, while his mother ran to and fro cackling in ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... replied, then he laughed, and the gold in his few remaining teeth glistened. Cackling and shuffling along beside Nancy, he muttered—his mind again ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... she began to collogue, Says she unto the fox, 'You're a stinking old rogue; Your scent it is so strong, I do wish you'd keep away;' The cackling old hen ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... the men threaded their way through the nests. The line was installed and the power applied. A one-hundred-fifty-watt bulb illuminated the interior of the chicken house to the discordant clucking and cackling ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... is a curious place. On account of the intense heat everything is brought alive to the market, and the quacking, cackling, gobbling, and crowing that go on are really marvellous. The whole street is alive with birds in baskets, cages, and coops, or tied by the leg and thrown down anyhow. There were curious pheasants and jungle-fowl from Perak, doves, pigeons, quails, besides cockatoos, parrots, parrakeets, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... loved; but I have not outlived the power of loving. I shall fret about you, Phineas, like an old hen after her one chick; and though you turn out to be a duck, and get away into waters where I cannot follow you, I shall go cackling round the pond, and always have my eye upon you." He was holding her now by the hand, but he could not speak for the tears were trickling down his cheeks. "When I was young," she continued, "I did not credit myself with capacity for so much passion. I told myself that love after ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... of birds is come, and the time of the cackling of homely, honest barn-yard fowls, who have never had justice done them. Why do we extol foreign growths and neglect the children of the soil? Where is there a more magnificent bird than the Rooster? What a lofty air! What a spirited pose of the head! Note ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... Kenmuir, Tammas declared with a certain grim pride: "He knows better'n to coom wheer Th' Owd Un be." Whereat M'Adam was taken with a fit of internal spasms, rubbing his knees and cackling insanely for a half-hour afterward. And as for the luck of the Grange—well, there was a reason for that too, so ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... tehee from gods and men, will come of the Duel! But how to turn it aside? For the King is determined. His truculent veracity of mind points out this as the real way for him; reasoning, entreating are to no purpose. "The true method, I tell you! As to the world and its cackling,—let the world cackle!" At length Borck hits on a consideration: "Your Majesty has been ill lately; hand perhaps not so steady as usual? Now if it should turn out that your Majesty proved so inferior to yourself ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... not look for a minute out of the schoolroom window without seeing something alive. Cows strolling across the meadow; Aunt Katharine's chickens venturing into the garden, and driven out by Peter, cackling and shrieking; companies of busy starlings working away on the lawn; it was all lively and cheerful, though Mrs Trevor always said it was "buried in the country." Haughton Park was considered a "beautiful place," and Philippa was used to hearing it spoken of as ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... statement there floated through the window a cackling, which, for volume and variety of key, beat anything that Garnet had ever heard. Judging from the noise, it seemed as if England had been drained of fowls and the entire tribe of them dumped into the yard ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... shade of some gigantic sycamore or overhanging willow. Here would he smoke his pipe of a sultry afternoon, enjoying the soft southern breeze and listening with silent gratulation to the clucking of his hens, the cackling of his geese, and the sonorous grunting of his swine; that combination of farmyard melody, which may truly be said to have a silver sound, inasmuch as it conveys a certain assurance of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... who returned with a barn-door fowl in his hand, a well-fed chanticleer, whose crow that morning had awakened his cackling dames for the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... from the board. "Well, why don't you take it? Take it if you're goin' to, and don't set there cackling!" ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... wayside shrines—sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman—which the low-caste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality. A solid line of blue, rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in haste, would swing up through the quivering dust and trot past to a chorus of quick cackling. That was a gang of changars—the women who have taken all the embankments of all the Northern railways under their charge—a flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed, blue-petticoated clan of earth-carriers, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... contempt and scorn he had suffered; as a boy he had heard the masters murmuring their disdain of him and of his desire to learn other than ordinary school work. As a young man he had suffered the insolence of these wretched people about him; their cackling laughter at his poverty jarred and grated in his ears; he saw the acrid grin of some miserable idiot woman, some creature beneath the swine in intelligence and manners, merciless, as he went by with his eyes on the dust, in his ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... heels of the geese. There he stooped and caught one of them, but instead of a goose he had a huge hedgehog in his hands, which he dropped in dismay; whereupon it waddled away a goose as before, and the whole of them began cackling and hissing in a way that he could not mistake. For the turkey-cock, he gobbled and gabbled and choked himself and got right again in the most ridiculous manner. In fact, he seemed sometimes to forget ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... Chauxville, you surely have news?" broke in the countess's cackling voice. "I have begged M. Steinmetz in vain. He says he has none; but is one to believe so notorious ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... two. The adult Whooping-cranes are white, the younger birds of a brownish color. This species is larger than the Sand-hill Crane, the latter having a total length of from forty to forty-two inches. The Sand-hill species may be distinguished from the Whooping-crane by its slate-blue color. The cackling, whooping, and screaming voices of an assembled multitude of these birds cannot be described. They can be heard for miles upon the open plains. These birds are found in Florida and along the Gulf coast ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... Every daily paper panders more or less to the lowest tastes of the mob, —while if the higher sentiments of man are not actually sneered at, they are made a subject for feeble surprise, or vapid 'gush.' An act of heroic unselfishness meets with such a cackling chorus of amazed, half-bantering approval from the leading-article writers, that one is forced to accept the suggestion implied,— namely that to BE heroic or unselfish is evidently an outbreak of noble instinct that is entirely ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and preparers of foodstuffs are their producers. Who has not eaten salt pork on a cattle ranch and longed for cream on a dairy farm? What city boarder has not discovered the woeful lack of connection between the cackling of hens and the certitude of fresh eggs on the table at the next meal? What muncher of Maine doughnuts in a Boston restaurant has not thought of the "sinkers" offered to him when he was ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... and noise and monotony seemed the very hardest to bear, the old man's cackling laugh was sure to rise above ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... with inexpressible complacency,—it was made evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her, carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,—not in the regular nest, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 'tis the same: I will take no notice of ye, But if I do not fit ye, let me fry for't; Is all this Cackling for your egg? they are fair ones, Excellent rich no doubt too; and may stumble A good staid mind, but I can go thus by 'em; My honest friend; do you set off ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (2 of 10) - The Humourous Lieutenant • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... about two o'clock in the afternoon, and I suddenly heard a strange sound, that of our fowl cackling. Yesterday I heard her tell-tale note about noon, and the day before just as I was eating my breakfast. I knew that it would be so! The serpent has entered Eden. That fowl has laid before eight in the morning for three weeks without interruption, and she has now ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... about" a market, till they are trapped to buy some unchewable old poultry, tough tup-mutton, stringy cow beef, or stale fish, at a very little less than the price of prime and proper food. With savings like these they toddle home in triumph, cackling all the way, like a goose that has ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... the northern shore, until, subdued and melted, it returns to be a mere part of the waves again. Instead of the hungry winter howl of the wolf or the whining snarl of the sneaking lynx the air is now filled with happier sounds: ducks are quacking; geese are honking; waveys are cackling as they fly northward; squirrels among the spruce trees chatter noisily; on sandy ridges woodchucks whistle excitedly; back deep in the birch thicket partridges are drumming, and all the woodland is musical with ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... Yankee jubilee of New England. Then every living thing makes itself happy, except the turkeys, and geese, and chickens. They, poor martyrs, have been scared into the middle of next week by the yells, and shrieks, and awful cackling of the whole army of winged creatures that sit in ten thousand ovens, with their legs tied, their wings twisted, and the gravy a-dripping down their sides and bosoms, like rain from the eaves of a house. Of course, for that day, every barn-yard ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... from his slumber. The fox nearly always takes his nap in the open fields, along the sides of the ridges, or under the mountain, where he can look down upon the busy farms beneath and hear their many sounds, the barking of dogs, the lowing of cattle, the cackling of hens, the voices of men and boys, or the sound of travel upon the highway. It is on that side, too, that he keeps the sharpest lookout, and the appearance of the hunter above and behind ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... to the door, Pierre following sulkily behind. But just as they reached the door there was a commotion outside, and the sound of quacking and men's laughter. And there came in a serving man bearing in his arms a great white goose, which was flapping his wings and cackling hoarsely in fright. ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... came a rustling sound in the underbrush. "P'raps it's savages," thought Archie, and, half pleased, half frightened at the idea, he gave a loud whoop. Out flew a fat motherly hen, cackling and screaming. What she was doing there in the woods I cannot imagine. Perhaps she had lost her way. Perhaps she had private business there which only hens can understand. Or it may be that she, too, had built a little house and hidden it away so that no ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... testimonials of affection, which polite attention the pig acknowledged by a prolonged squealing, that drowned the voices of the women and Andy together; and now the cocks and hens that were roosting on the rafters of the cabin were startled by the din, and the crowing and cackling and the flapping of the frightened fowls, as they flew about in the dark, added to the ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... of it, but it was probably from her wanting him to be blind to everything on earth but her, and a man isn't going to be blind when he wants to see, and then she got hurt. I'd rather live in a house with a cackling hen or a grunting pig than the sort of person who is always getting hurt. But she's very pretty. Pink-and-white pretty, with uplifting eyes and a little mouth that shuts itself when mad and says nothing, and oozes more disagreeableness than if it talked. He still thinks there isn't another ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... Betsy's cackling propensities, and long before he quitted Mrs Forster, it was generally believed throughout the good town of Overton that Mr Spinney, although he had not been killed outright, as reported in the first instance, had subsequently died of the injuries ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... best. She came alone, and the men at the gates, instructed, let her in. She gazed around the courtyard with its burden of grain that had been crushed out of her people below, with its loitering soldiers and cackling fowls, and she shivered as the gates ...
— The Truce of God • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... angry then and, flinging the dress on the floor, had risen haughtily. "I think he will marry me," she had announced, to be met with blank surprise, followed by cackling old laughter. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was now past; and the cackling rose jubilant, louder than ever, and might have continued till daylight, had not a window in the courtyard been suddenly thrown open, and the awful voice ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... cackling laugh, and in the act showed the four long eye-teeth which were the sole remaining dental ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... life's panorama, creaking on at every jolt. This was the 'must' Grisel had sent him back to—these poor fools packed together in a panic at an old stale tale! Well, they would all come out presently, and cluster; and the crested, cackling fellow would lead them safely away out of the ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... got anything really decent yet!" sighed Aveline, watching with envious eyes as Hermie exhibited her treasure to the admiring visitors. "The Sixth are cackling ever so hard." ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... had fallen even while the worthy smith had been talking to him overnight, his ears were assailed by the peaceful and comfortable sounds inseparable from farmhouse life and occupation. He heard the cackling of hens, the grunting of pigs, and the rough voices of the hinds as they got the horses out of the sheds, and prepared to commence the labours of the day with harrow or plough. These sounds were familiar enough to Paul; they seemed to carry ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... were born there was plenty of room in the house, for the mother of Jean-Pierre had gone away to dwell under a heavy stone in the cemetery of Ploumar. On that day, for the first time since his son's marriage, the elder Bacadou, neglected by the cackling lot of strange women who thronged the kitchen, left in the morning his seat under the mantel of the fireplace, and went into the empty cow-house, shaking his white locks dismally. Grandsons were all very well, but he wanted his soup at midday. When shown the ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... or fears of a crew of Wajiji to return to Unyanyembe without having resolved the problem of the Rusizi River, we had surely deserved to be greeted by everybody at home with a universal giggling and cackling. But Capt. Burton's failure to settle it, by engaging Wajiji, and that ridiculous savage chief Kannena, had warned us of the negative assistance we could expect from such people for the solution of a geographical problem. We had enough good sailors with ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... corranto. Zounds, lad! I have your friend the carpenter to thank for much. As he says in his letter, unless a man can get the good that is in him out, he is of loss value in the world than one of those fowls that we hear cackling, for they at least fulfill their mission, if it be only to lay eggs. Ged, it is a new creed ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... engaged a native boat, which had to be kept outside the surf. Mrs. Sherman was first taken in the arms of two stout natives; Mary Lynch, carrying Lizzie, was carried by two others; and I followed, mounted on the back of a strapping fellow, while fifty or a hundred others were running to and fro, cackling like geese. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... gazing smirkily after him. Then we went into the park a few paces and sat on a bench in full view, talking—or Peter was—most volubly. He was really choking with laughter. A little later, at seven-thirty, we went cackling into the park, only to return in five minutes as though we had changed our minds and were coming out—and saw Dick bustling off at our approach. It was sad really. There was an element of the tragic in it. But not to Peter. He was all laughter, all but apoplectic gayety. "Oh, by ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... nettled by the cackling and the thigh-slapping of the audience on the sidewalk. He reached for his stage whip, and missing it used his ready Irish fists. So the Bohunks crawled unhappily back into the car and subsided shivering and with tears ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... gasping cry. He moved unsteadily toward the door, then paused with his hand upon the knob. Tom Parker was surprised when, after a moment, he saw the man's shoulders shake and heard him utter a thin, cackling laugh. "Time is a grim old joker, isn't he? No way of beating him, none at all. Now I thought I was young, but—Lucky I found you here and spared my vanity." He turned, exposing a face strangely contorted. "You won't mention my foolish mistake, will you? ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... hag, she was already dressed to go upon the street, in fact he intercepted her at the very door of the building. Still clad as he was in the mantle and wimple of an old woman, Til did not, at first, recognize him, and when he spoke, she burst into a nervous, cackling laugh, as one caught in the perpetration of some questionable act, nor did her manner escape the shrewd notice of ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... happy time for me. Usually the last half of March, when rills from the melting snow began to come through the fields, the veins of the sugar maples began to thrill with the spring warmth. There was a general awakening about the farm at this time: the cackling of the hens, the bleating of young lambs and calves, and the wistful lowing of the cows. Earlier in the month the "sap spiles" had been overhauled, resharpened, and new ones made, usually from bass wood. In my time the sap gouge ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... look after him," Peter said, turning to the astounded Mrs. Pascoe. As he moved he saw a surprising sight, his grandfather's door was opened and his grandfather (who had not been on his feet for a great many years) was standing in the middle of it, cackling with laughter, dressed in a very ugly yellow dressing-gown, his old knotted hands clutching the sides of the door, his shrivelled body shaking, and his feet in ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... "finds" of Spode or Wedgwood in old junk-shops, or the most authentic information as to why the Palfreys had no cards to Mrs. Livingstone's kettledrums, while Jane listened with a quizzical gleam in her eyes, as she did to the little bantam hen outside cackling and strutting over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the fiery red streams of awakening life that we all manifest at sunrise; then comes a change of magnetic polarity after the first fiery flush of cosmic life; the gleeful chattering of the birds and the cackling of the poultry. A reaction is noted; all things before active become ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... measuring 6ft. 7in. across the wings, and weighing 11lbs. I rode over to see it, but it had been sent to the taxidermist to be stuffed. It was a sea eagle (Haliactus albicilla). The kite (milvus ictinus) used to be common 40 years ago; its presence being notified by our hens cackling, and ducks quacking, as they called together their broods, when they espied it soaring at a considerable height above. If a reckless chick, or duckling, neglected to take the warning, and seek shelter beneath the mother’s wings, there was for a moment a rushing sound, a general ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... or four centuries ago, and had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought to light, together with a history of Walt Whitman's simple and disinterested life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that would at once break out in the whole brood of critics over the golden egg that had been uncovered? This reckon would be a favorite ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... I find elsewhere, the bees knowing by instinct who they are working for; and the poultry is fatter and tenderer, the hens being careful never to over-fatigue themselves, and the peacocks and the geese not to exhaust themselves in screaming and cackling. All nature, alive and dead, takes upon itself a trimmer and more ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... 'The man forlorn Hears Earth send up a foolish noise aloft.' 'And what'll he do? What'll he do?' scoff'd The Blackbird, standing, in an ancient thorn, Then spread his sooty wings and flitted to the croft With cackling laugh; Whom I, being half Enraged, called after, ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job we make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... numbers of the latter are seen, flitting to and fro, or poised on whirring wings before the bell-shaped blossoms of the fuchsias. [Note 3.] From the deeper recesses of the wood at intervals comes a loud, cackling cry, resembling the laugh of an idiot. It is the call-note of the black woodpecker. And, as if in response to it, a kingfisher, perched on the limb of a dead tree by the beach, now and then utters its shrill, ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... waited awhile, then crawled toward the fruit garden. After twenty or thirty yards more, he saw a gleam of red, then under it a bright yellow eye glaring at him. He had chanced on a hen sitting on her nest. He came nearer, she took alarm and ran away, not clucking, but cackling loudly. There were a dozen eggs of two different styles, all bright and clean, and the hen's comb was bright red. Yan knew hens. This was easy to read: Two stray hens laying in one nest, and neither of them ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... imitative, conventional, he fell like leviathan into a duck-pond, and the commotion and consternation he created there have not yet subsided. All the reigning poets in this country except Emerson denied him, and many of our minor poets still keep up a hostile sissing and cackling. He will probably always be more or less a stumbling-block to the minor poet, because of his indifference to the things which to the minor poet are all in all. He was a poet without what is called artistic form, and without ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... why the joyous cackle when leaving her nest after doing her full duty? She gloats over it, and glories in it, and announces her satisfaction to the whole yard. It is something to be proud of, and the cackling hen knows it better than you or I. It can be no hardship to push this egg machine to the limit of its capacity. It adds new zest to the life of the hen, and multiplies her opportunities for ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... and green blanket beyond the blaze; and Dade, watching, could see his profile sharply defined in the yellow light of the fire, as he stared toward the offending camp. The lips that smiled so often were drawn tight and thin; the nostrils flared like a frightened horse. While the laughs were still cackling derision, Valencia jumped up and ran; and Dade, even before he sat up to look, knew where ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... me listen forever to the cackling of hens in the country?" interrupted the prince, now impatient. "Be well, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Will clearlier shine, like sunburst through a rift In congregated cloud-wracks. Shylock stands Badged with black shame in all the baser lands. Use him, and—spit on him! That's Gentile wont; Make him gold-conduit, and befoul the font,— That's the true despot-plan through all the days, And cackling Gratianos chorus praise. "The Jew shall have all justice." Shall he so? The tyrant drains, his gold, then bids him—"Go!" Shylock? The name bears insult in its sound; But he was nobler than the curs who hound The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... go thither like a cat at a robin. But this was me all over. I am like a silly hen that can lay no egg without cackling, and convening all the house to rob her on't. Next time you and I are after aught the least amiss, let's do't in Heaven's name then and there, and not take time to think about it, far less talk; so then, if they take us ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... curs, bawling of mastiffs, bleating of sheep, prating of parrots, tattling of jackdaws, grunting of swine, girning of boars, yelping of foxes, mewing of cats, cheeping of mice, squeaking of weasels, croaking of frogs, crowing of cocks, cackling of hens, calling of partridges, chanting of swans, chattering of jays, peeping of chickens, singing of larks, creaking of geese, chirping of swallows, clucking of moorfowls, cucking of cuckoos, bumbling of bees, rammage of hawks, chirming of linnets, croaking of ravens, screeching of owls, whicking ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... housewives set their kitchen clocks by Eddie's transits to and from the factory. At any rate, there was no end to the occasions when shiftless gossips, dawdling on their porches, were surprised to see Eddie toddle homeward, and scurried away, cackling: ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... broader path to the house, the cackling laugh of a goat chained to a roadside log followed her cynically. Where had she heard this bleat before? Ah, yes, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... on a camel, another on a buffalo, the third on a donkey, and the fourth used his own legs. In Wady Boghel were the signs of a field of ghaseb having existed last year. The ground was covered by a sickly wild melon; and in the thick foliage of the trees the guinea-hens were cackling. Here Dr. Barth saw the first specimen of the baure tree, the trunk measuring twenty-six feet in circumference, and the thick crown rising to the height of eighty feet. Here and elsewhere wild beasts were observed. The whole country, indeed, abounds in lions, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... for a moment and gave Jack time to dash through the hen-hole into the yard, where he hid to one side. The Greyhound rushed around to the low gate, leaped over that among the Hens, and as they fled cackling and fluttering, some Lambs bleated loudly. Their natural guardian, the big black Dog, ran to the rescue, and Warhorse slipped out again by the hole at which he had entered. Horrible sounds of Dog hate and fury were heard behind him in the hen-yard, and soon the shouts of men were added. ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... back into the rivers where they belonged. But, they were not happy. Before long they quarrelled. The gura," holding up the trumpeter, which was like a turkey without a tail, for such it was, "was forever cackling and scolding and the chapla" pointing to the curassow, which resembled a turkey with a long tail, "resented this and answered in loud squawks. Then they began to fight. The chapla pushed the gura into the fire over which she was ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... Scrope and her valuables were to be saved. The house seemed full of smoke as they entered it; and Dorcas led them up the stairs into the parlour, at the window of which her mistress was standing, leaning upon her stick, and uttering a succession of short, sharp exclamations, intermingled with the cackling laugh of ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... affectation of a gentlewoman, not a harlot's affectation, which is simply and without exaggeration what the stage commonly gives us for a fine lady; an old woman in her hands was a thorough woman, thoroughly old, not a cackling young person of epicene gender. She played Sir Harry Wildair like a man, which is how he ought to be played (or, which is better still, not at all), so that Garrick acknowledged her as a male rival, and abandoned the part ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... deal due to lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and, when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... mole burrowing in the ground, a swallow soaring in the air, the cuckoo which can do nothing but utter two notes, a flaming and a blinking candle, or a pound of candles falling to the ground, a boy chasing a butterfly, the cackling of a hen when she has laid her egg, all, to his imaginative mind, set forth some spiritual truth or enforce some wholesome moral lesson. How racy, though homely, are these lines on ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... strawberry shortcakes, and cherry-pies, and green peas, and new potatoes, and string beans, and roasting-ears, and all such garden-stuff, and the fresh eggs, broken into the skillet before Speckle gets done cackling, and the cockerels we pick off the roost Saturday evenings (you see, we're thinning 'em out; no sense in keeping all of 'em over winter)—as a result, I say, of all this good eating, and the outdoor life, and the necessity of stirring around a little lively these days we feel pretty ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... cheer from all the assembled company, the animals adding their roars and growls and barks and mewing and cackling to swell the glad tumult, and then all seated themselves at ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... I can't stand hearing a carved turkey like you cackling rot about marriage. Think of your own mamma. If she hadn't got married, where would ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... and a Hen chanced to occupy adjacent apartments, and the former complained loudly that her rest was disturbed by the cackling of her humble neighbour. "Why is it," she finally asked the Hen, "that you make such an intolerable noise?" The Hen replied, "Because I have laid an egg." "Oh no," said the Ostrich, with a superior smile, "it is because you are a Hen and don't ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee
... robbed and assaulted," Ezra said, steadying himself against the mantelpiece, for he was still weak and giddy. "Don't all start cackling, but do what I ask ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... magnificent snowy plumage would come flying in over the dark forest high in air and then volplane to the little pond where, in the heavily massed bushes, their nests were thickly clustered. With vivid distinctness he imitated the cackling notes of the {150} old birds as they settled on their nests, and the shrill cries of the little ones, as on unsteady legs they reached upward for ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... the petunias. His neck was still stiff from the fall and no one had remembered to inquire about it—that was another reason for the disgruntled mood in which the moment found him. The women were making perfect fools of themselves over that Pinkey—they were at it now, he could hear them cackling on the veranda. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... referred to is the invasion of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C. They captured the whole of the city, except the Capitol, which was successfully defended by Manlius, who had been put on the alert by the cackling of ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... call, something between a hoot and a shriek, which causes us to cover our ears. After such an experience, we turn with relief to the sober hens who are contented to cluck peacefully through life, reserving their cackling until they have done something of which to boast, and wish to inform us that the egg they have laid is at ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... knew that Thuran was quite close beside him. He heard a cackling laugh, something touched his face, and he ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... express their feelings better than human language. Laughter, so far as we can judge, could not have been obtained by any mere mental exercise, nor would it have come from imitation, for it is only found in man, the yelping of a hyena being as different from it as the barking of a dog, or the cackling of a goose. We may, however, suppose that the first sounds uttered by man were demonstrative of pain or pleasure, marking a great primary distinction, which we make in common with all animals. But ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... duck-pond, but it was nothing after all. All the ducks lying quietly on the water or standing on their heads in it—for they could do that—at once swarm to the sides; the traces of their feet were seen in the wet earth, and their cackling was heard far and wide. The water, which a few moments before had been as clear and smooth as a mirror, became very troubled. Before, every tree, every neighbouring bush, the old farmhouse with ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... walking along the road a sound fell upon my ears which in my hale days never produced any very unpleasant sensations, but which did now. I mean the cackling of the field people of both sexes returning from their day's work. These people knew me well, and they liked me, and I am sure they had no idea that when they ran past me on the road their looks and nods gave me no pleasure, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in an ash-can, the other blowing along like a belated bat beside the trolley track. It began to seem to David as if the earth might be strewn with abandoned umbrellas. Before he began his work he went to the farmer's and returned in triumph, driven in the farm-wagon, with his cackling hens and quite a load of household furniture, besides some bread and pies. The farmer's wife was one of those who are able to give, and make receiving greater than giving. She had looked at David, who was older ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... seen to be understood. They advanced this time in earnest, and if I offered to let the boldest listen, by holding out my watch to him, he would draw back alarmed, although smiling, while the band would break into an outburst of joy; the ducklings flapping their wings, the white geese cackling, and the chickens going chk, chk. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... village value of a cabbage? How should he understand the farmyard value of a fowl? It may possibly strike him as odd that vegetables should be so dear when, as he rides about, he sees whole fields green with them. He sees plenty of fowls, and geese, and turkeys, gobbling and cackling about the farmyards, and can perhaps after awhile faintly perceive that they are the perquisites of the ladies of the tenants' households, who drive him a very hard bargain. He, too, has cast aside suits, shoes, hats, and so forth, really but little worn, to give away ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Cap'n Lem's cackling laugh burst forth. "She don't look it, does she?" he responded. "So ye're likin' all right, ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... his noise gives men warning to avoid him, otherwise he will make them wish they had. He is, like a bell, good for nothing but to make a noise. He is like common fame, that speaks most and knows least, Lord Brooks, or a wild goose always cackling when he is upon the wing. His tongue is like any kind of carriage, the less weight it bears the faster and easier it goes. He is so full of words that they run over and are thrown away to no purpose, and so empty ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... shame and confusion in her face, and some anger. But she turned without a word, and went quickly down the passage, followed by his evil, cackling laugh. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... of Betsy's cackling propensities; and long before he quitted Mrs Forster, it was generally believed throughout the good town of Overton that Mr Spinney, although he had not been killed outright, as reported in the first instance, had subsequently died of the injuries ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... I saw it; and I've seen it every day since the police were taken off guard. Sick!" again came the cackling old laugh. "Sick! Why, she ain't no more ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... ordained that during all his life the Desert Rat should be engaged in learning how to die, and meet the issue unafraid. For the Desert Rat was a philosopher, and even at this ghastly spectacle his sense of humor did not desert him. He sat down on the skull of one of the burros and laughed—a dry cackling gobble. ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... one to the other.] Yes, Cocks affecting incongruous forms, Cocks crowned with cocoa-palm coiffures—Hear me talk like the Peacock! I lapse into alliteration! [Finding his fun in bewildering them with cackling guttural volubility.] Yes, Cockerels cockaded with cockles, Cockatrice-headed Cockasters, cock-eyed Cockatoos! Not content to be common Cocks, your crotchet it was to be what but crack Cocks? Yes, Fashion, to be accounted of thy flock, these chuckle-headed ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... the fortune of John Tullis, who had been pushed forward by the wide-eyed Prince. In a cackling monotone she rambled through a supposititious history of his past, for the chief part so unintelligible that even he could not gainsay the statements. Later, she bent her piercing eyes upon the Prince and refused to read his future, shrilly asserting that she had not the courage to tell what might ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... of our English Jacobins. That faction is put out of sight and out of thought. "It vanished at the crowing of the cock." Scarcely had the Gallic harbinger of peace and light begun to utter his lively notes, than all the cackling of us poor Tory geese to alarm the garrison of the Capitol was forgot.[11] There was enough of indemnity before. Now a complete act of oblivion is passed about the Jacobins of England, though one would naturally imagine it would ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... room. The others, conducted by Robin, had all trooped out to inspect what Lady Susan gaily insisted upon referring to as the "Cottage Poultry Farm," and distantly through the open window came the fluttered cackling of the White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds, resentful of this unaccountable intrusion of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the turnips and carrots sown. Before the month was over, the garden and potato-field were cropped, and Humphrey took upon himself to weed and keep it clean. Little Edith had also employment now, for the hens began to lay eggs, and as soon as she heard them cackling, she ran for the eggs and brought them in; and before the month was over, Jacob had set four hens upon eggs. Billy, the pony, was now turned out to graze in the forest; he came home every ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... the window panes are starred! A third augments the vocal shock Till steeples to their bases rock, Confessing, as they humbly nod, They hear and mark the will of God. A fourth in oral thunder vents His awful penury of sense Till dogs with sympathetic howls, And lowing cows, and cackling fowls, Hens, geese, and all domestic birds, Attest the wisdom of his words. Cranks thus their intellects deflate Of theories about the State. This one avers 'tis built on Truth, And that on Temperance. This youth Declares that Science bears the pile; That graybeard, ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... clocks with chamois climbing wooden rocks. Nothing apparently in that shop had been "made in Germany." When we reached the verandah of the "Nassauer Hof" we were gladdened by bows from the "Assessor" and the student, who with the "cackling geese" were seated at a long table consuming piles of Apfelkuchen, Streuselkuchen, and Napfkuchen to an accompaniment of ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... below. He found some sheets of parchment and a reed pen, and lent her the inkhorn from his own girdle. As he was depositing these on a great oaken table, he glanced out of the window and gave a high cackling laugh. ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... shrill, cackling laugh. "Taking anything. No. You mean morphine or something of that kind? Pas si bete, my dear. Oh, no, I have always had a perfect horror of anything ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... berry silly, obstinacious ol' man. Yes, suh indeed." And he went off cackling to himself. He had only just gone when I heard footsteps again behind my azalea clump, and ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... her body. "My father has just had me strangled," she sighed. "How is it that I find myself in this place? Here are neither mountains, nor trees, nor vegetation; no sun, moon, nor stars; no habitation, no sound, no cackling of a fowl nor barking of a dog. How can I live in this ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... and all her race; 'Tis the same rope at diff'rent ends they twist; To Dulness Ridpath is as dear as Mist.) Shall I, like Curtius, desperate in my zeal, O'er head and ears plunge for the commonweal? Or rob Rome's ancient geese of all their glories, And cackling save the monarchy of Tories? Hold—to the minister I more incline; To serve his cause, O Queen! is serving thine. And see! the very Gazetteers give o'er, Ev'n Ralph repents, and Henley writes no more. What then remains? Ourself. Still, still remain Cibberian ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... and therefore when he returned he would show that he had not travelled without profit by having one made exactly similar for his best chamber, with hens and ducks under it, pleasantly feeding and joyously cackling and quacking. And he also observed a remarkable sagacity in the ducks, for when they saw he was a stranger, they turned up the sides of their heads and eyed him in a most curious and inquisitive manner,—very different, indeed, from the ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... hen cackling, but said: "I am very busy just at present, for this is the eve of a holy day, and I must clean and arrange this room. I will go for the ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... various sizes, and he was about to go elsewhere when he stumbled against a short piece and set it rolling to the middle of the floor. Picking it up he threw it back into the corner, where it clanged with a noise that sent a hen cackling from her nest in a remote part ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... returning to Cecilia, said, "Can you conjecture who was making those soft speeches? a Shylock! his knife all the while in his hand, and his design, doubtless, to cut as near the heart as possible! while the loud cackling from the other side is owing to the riotous merriment of a noisy Mentor! when next I hear a disturbance, I shall expect to see some simpering Pythagoras stunned ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... demonstrativeness; and there is much in our present type of social manners and conduct which betrays our barbarous origin. The brute-like sounds that escape from the human throat in the exercise of laughter, the coarse guffaw, the hoarse chuckle, and the high, cackling tones in which many of the feminine half of the world express their sense of amusement, attest very painfully the animal nature within us. It was Emerson, I believe, who expressed a dislike of all loud laughter; and it is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... although Saduko's hen was cackling very loudly just at this time, he was not destined to find the coveted egg. But of that matter I ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... like a fit of coughing, and rose to the high cackling mirth of extreme age. At the sound both Anton and the monk took to praying. Presently it stopped, and her voice came full and strong as ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... Cant. Some were for War, and some on Mischief bent; And some who could, for gain, new Plots invent. Some Priests and Levites too among the rest, Such as knew how to blow the Trumpet best: Who with loud noise and cackling, cri'd like Geese, For Rites, for Temple, and for dearer Fleece. 'Twixt God and Baal, these Priests divided were; } Which did prevail, these greatly did not care; } But headlong drove, without or wit or fear. } The Pharasees ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... meant to try a chair, to-morrow; but, in view of her predictions, I'll be hanged if I will. She would go to cackling forth that it was all her doing. How do you suppose she knew anything about ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... extent of verdant plains and yellow desert. It is a favourite view of the tourists of the agencies, and we meet again our friends of the mosque, who have preceded us hither—the gentlemen with the loud voices, the bellowing guide and the cackling lady. Some soldiers are standing there too, smoking their pipes contemplatively. But spite of all these people, in spite, too, of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on arrival ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by season season'd are To their right praise, and true perfection! 1259 SHAKS.: M. of Venice, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... sensuous-philtred Mead Dispels the cackling Hag of Night at Need, And, foggy-aureoled, the Smoke reveals The Poppy Flowers that blossom from ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... joyousness as being laughter, cackling, and much silly noise; and to such I do not speak. But the Christ's joyousness is of a high, still, marvellous, and ineffable completeness—beyond all words; and wholly satisfying to heart and ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... thus recapitulated. It would avail nothing to argue now whether those deeds were sins or virtues, nor would it have availed then. The child had grown up and was strong, and chose to go alone into the world. The young bird was fledged, and flew away. Poor George III. with his cackling was certainly not efficacious in restraining such a flight. But it is gratifying to see how this new people, when they had it in their power to change all their laws, to throw themselves upon any Utopian theory that the folly of a ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... hen flies, fluttering and cackling, so did Mrs. Pryor flutter and cackle, up the street, with Mrs. Weight, still breathless, pounding and ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... David said querulously. "You'll set a lot of women cackling, and what they don't know they'll ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart |
