Study the following paragraph, decide which ideas are important, and strike out the details that merely clog the thought: As I stepped into the room, I heard the clock ticking and that caused me to look at it.

At first there was silence and complete darkness, but soon after one o'clock I heard the very slight but unmistakable tick-tick, which told me that the apparition was about to appear.

I counted the tickings of its silence, and I counted the tickings of its continuance.

It was all still and spooky and you could hear the clock ticking, and I counted the ticks.

No other sound broke the stillness of that quiet sunset hour save the solemn ticking of the long, old-fashioned clock at the farther end of the big, book-lined room, with its wide fireplace, great overmantel of carved stone with emblazoned arms, and its three long windows of old stained glass which gave it a somewhat ecclesiastical aspect.

I could catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow.

There was no bedding upon it but a ragged kind of quilt, which covered the ticking.

And how the trout enjoy the ticks that come from their thickly matted coats!

I was expecting the tearful ticking off, the girlish recriminations and all the rest of the bag of tricks along those lines.

All the servants had to fill up their bed-ticks with fine gin cottonthe lint partfor safe keeping.

Then your Aunt Hattie's hens are so obliging that they keep me from the worry of finding ticks at shearing time.

How orderly the kitchen 'd look by night, With just a clock, But they could gag the tick, And mice won't bark;

" "We'll git tick at William's, and you can settle 'th us when you git your pay.

The clock had given only two ticks when she was upon him, but in that time she had completely changed her plan of action.

It sounded spooky, going tick, tick, tick.

In the brief pauses of his song the old clock, from which Rudolph had removed the pendulum on the night of Agatha's death would interpose an obstinate slow ticking; and immediately the clock-noise would be drowned in melody.

The Indies of the Mazzaron desire nothing but little clocks; they like the tick.'

What makes a free-sheeter tick: Ask any good physician and he (or, as per the recent trend in MBBS graduation, she) will tell you that one's circulation must be good.

I miss the tick of the clocks, but my work is easy and I have excellent good friends.

All the year round, I let them run among the sheep, and they nab every tick they see.

The cold was so bitter during the night that he had to open the ticking of his bed and crawl inside.

They feed on the insects disturbed by the hoofs of the cattle, and often cling to them and pick off the ticks.

" Outsiders, when asked what was going on in POLLY's store, always answered with a wise look, "POLLY ticks."

A benevolent hedge-hog offered to remove the ticks, but the fox declined the kind offer on the ground that his ticks were already full of blood and had ceased to annoy him much, whereas if they were removed, a new colony of ticks would establish themselves and thus entirely drain him of blood.

Although still in his sleeping clothes, he seized his trench tick and rushed towards them.