Soon they heard a
clucking sound and a chorus of "cheep!
Some chickens were
clucking outside the windows, scratching for bits of gravel in the grass.
They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that they did not begin talking for a long while, the silence being broken only by the
clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them.
Mother Atkinson, as all called their hostess, was the merriest there, and the busiest; for she kept flying up to wait on the children, to bring out some new dish, or to banish the live stock, who were of such a social turn that the colt came into the entry and demanded sugar; the cats sat about in people's laps, winking suggestively at the food; and speckled hens cleared the kitchen floor of crumbs, as they joined in the chat with a cheerful
clucking.
In front of the door a
clucking hen was scratching in the dust with a brood of chickens about her heels, the sparrows were chattering of household affairs under the eaves, and all was so sweet and peaceful that Little John's heart laughed within him.
Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life, generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the pheasant clucking in the ditch.
Mary dipped her hand in the bucket he carried, and was at once the center of a circle also; and as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to her brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it sounded to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers in his black overcoat.
On frosty nights the humane Negro prowler would warm the end of the plank and put it up under the cold claws of chickens roosting in a tree; a drowsy hen would step on to the comfortable board, softly
clucking her gratitude, and the prowler would dump her into his bag, and later into his stomach, perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure--his liberty--he was not committing any sin that God would remember against him in the Last Great Day.
I was knocked backward fully a dozen feet before I fetched up against the ground, and I remember, half-stunned, even as the blow was struck, hearing the wild uproar of
clucking and shrieking laughter that arose from the caves.
He uttered a
clucking noise in advertisement of his friendliness, and Michael snarled at this black who had dared to lay hands upon him--a contamination, according to Michael's training--and who now dared to address him who associated only with white gods.
New York, with its shoving, jostling, hurrying crowds; a giant fowl-run, full of human fowls scurrying to and fro;
clucking, ever on the look-out for some desired morsel, and ever ready to swoop down and snatch it from its temporary possessor, had numbed her.
Be that as it might, the hens were now scarcely larger than pigeons, and had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind of movement, and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the variations of their
clucking and cackling.
clucking - the sound made by a hen (as in calling her chicks)