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.

She heard the clucking sound of a spruce hen in the bush a few yards away, and now that sound came to her as if from out of another world.

Later he recalled that in the sudden silence many noises disturbed the lazy hush of the Indian-summer afternoon: the rush of a motor-car on the Boston Road, the tinkle of the piano and the voice of the youth with the drugged eyes singing, "And you'll wear a simple gingham gown," from the yard below the cluck-cluck of the chickens and the cooing of pigeons.

Having had your little warning against clucking, perhaps you will now sympathize with the indignant Englishwoman who, having been almost unseated by a similar mischance, responded, when the clucking cause thereof rode up to say that he was sorry that her horse should behave so: "It wasn't the horse that was in fault, sir; it was a donkey."

Pat's gettin' good wages, an' the two of them were talkin' o' takin' that little thatched cabin just out of the town" "A cabin!" said Juliana, and began to turn up her eyes, and to make a strange clucking noise in her throat.

I took the two great clucking things and vainly tried to thrust their feetor is it claws hens have?into a tiny corner, and they had just wrecked all my efforts when I woke!