Surely it was a hen
cackling! But her wide-open eyes first saw, through the slats of the coop, the blue waves of the ocean, now calm and placid, and her thoughts flew back to the past night, so full of danger and discomfort.
Then he dropped in five more dirty, kicking,
cackling hens upon the top of Pigling Bland.
When we flashed the lantern in their eyes, the hens set up a great
cackling and flew about clumsily, scattering down-feathers.
"Plenty for all," the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by
cackling shrilly.
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 wily master of fence.
"Long time you fella Tiha no sit 'm along canoe," Aora bawled to the victim and set Bashti
cackling again.
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, hurrying north on news of a job, and wasting no time by the road.
"Your leather betrayed you," he said, laughing his
cackling laugh.
And Tarwater would lift his voice in the cackling chant, as he lifted it at the end, when the boat swung in through driving cake- ice and moored to the Dawson City bank, and all waterfront Dawson pricked its ears to hear the triumphant paean: Like Argus of the ancient times, We leave this modern Greece, Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum, To shear the Golden Fleece,
Days later--how many days later he was never to know--dreaming dreams and seeing visions, cackling his old gold-chant of Forty- Nine, like one drowning and swimming feebly to keep his consciousness above the engulfing dark, he came out upon the snow- slope to a canyon and saw below smoke rising and men who ceased from work to gaze at him.
The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the
cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested!
And while as he made the change in dress he made so many whimsical comments also about a man's pride and the dress that makes a man, that the palmer was like to choke with
cackling laughter.