Love Among the Chickens

If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.

I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.

Conversationally, I am like a clockwork toy. I have to be set going.

I was in that painful condition which occurs when one has lost one's first wind and has not yet got one's second.

All nice girls sketch a little.

Have you ever seen a man, woman, or child who wasn’t eating an egg or just going to eat an egg or just coming away from eating an egg? I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of daily life. Stop the first man you meet in the street and ask him which he’d sooner lose, his egg or his wife, and see what he says!

The coops were finished. They were not masterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in deep thought, as who should say: "Now what in the world have we struck here?" But they were coops, within the meaning of the act, and we induced the hens to become tenants.

He's such a dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, pure, bred Persian. He has taken prizes." "He's always taking something - generally food.

I went into the kitchen ten minutes back. The cat was sitting on the mat." Beale's narrative style closely resembled that of a certain book I had read in my infancy. I wish I could remember its title. It was a well-written book.

I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a mean trick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order of cauliflower.

Garnet could feel that he himself was not looking his best. He knew in a vague, impersonal way that his eyebrows were still somewhere in the middle of his forehead, whither they had sprung in the first moment of surprise, and that his jaw, which ad dropped, had not yet resumed its normal posture. Before committing himself to speech he made a determined effort to revise his facial expression.

There are few things more restful than to watch some one else busy under a warm sun.

There were no gentlemen, but cads. Scoundrels. Creatures that it would be rank flattery to describe as human beings.

His play had become wilder and wilder at each hole in arithmetical progression. If he had been a plow, he could hardly have turned up more soil. The imagination recoiled from the thought of what he would be doing in another half hour if he deteriorated at his present speed.

I was growing annoyed with the man. I could have ducked him but for the reflection that my prospects of obtaining his consent to my engagement with Phyllis would hardly have been enhanced thereby. No more convincing proof of my devotion can be given than this, that I did not seize the little man by the top of his head, thrust him under water, and keep him there.

Well, my aunt, sir, when 'er fowls 'ad the roop, she give them snuff. Give them snuff, she did," he repeated with relish, "every morning." "Snuff!" said Mrs. Ukridge. "Yes, ma'am. She give them snuff till their eyes bubbled." Mrs. Ukridge uttered a faint squeak at this vivid piece of word painting. "And did it cure them?" asked Ukridge. "No, sir," responded the expert soothingly. "They died.

There was a ham, in its third quarter, and a chicken which had suffered heavily during a previous visit to the table.

Waterloo station is one of the things which no fellow can understand. Thousands come to it, thousands go from it. Porters grow gray-headed beneath its roof. Buns, once fresh and tender, become hard and misanthropic in its refreshment rooms, and look as if they had seen the littleness of existence and were disillusioned. But there the station stands, year after year, wrapped in a discreet gloom, always the same, always baffling and inscrutable. Not even the porters understand it. "I couldn't say, sir," is the civil but unsatisfying reply with which research is met. Now and then one, more gifted than his colleagues, will inform the traveler that his train starts from "No. 3 or No. 7," but a moment's reflection and he hedges with No. 12.

The singer could hardly have been drowned in a hip bath, but Mr. Garnet hoped for the best.