beck

With her gay plumage, her "nods and becks and wreathed smiles," and her cheerful cackle, Huldah closely resembled the parrot in Wordsworth's poem:--

I discovered, too, that a great pleasure, an enjoyment which the horizon only bounded, lay all outside the high and spike-guarded walls of our garden: this pleasure consisted in prospect of noble summits girdling a great hill-hollow, rich in verdure and shadow; in a bright beck, full of dark stones and sparkling eddies.

Beck's front parlor--fat and shabby, hoping somebody will invite you to dinner--spending your morning in learning a comic song--oh no!

"How she rode that kicking mare at Queen's Crawley!" And he would say to her in confidential moments, "By Jove, Beck, you're fit to be Commander-in- Chief, or Archbishop of Canterbury, by Jove." Is his case a rare one?

But that men fear him for that he hath the storms and the lightnings and all the devils that be in hell at his beck and call, they would have dug his en- trails out these many years ago to get at that tale and squelch it.

John Jasper invites the boy with a beck of his head to follow him

When they rose up from the ground, and took the shady track which led them through the wood, she bounded on before, printing her tiny footsteps in the moss, which rose elastic from so light a pressure and gave it back as mirrors throw off breath; and thus she lured the old man on, with many a backward look and merry beck, now pointing stealthily to some lone bird as it perched and twittered on a branch that strayed across their path, now stopping to listen to the songs that broke the happy silence, or watch the sun as it trembled through the leaves, and stealing in among the ivied trunks of stout old trees, opened long paths of light.

Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear.

The Sheriff thereupon planned three new expeditions into the greenwood, and was even brave enough to lead them, since he had fifteen-score men at his beck and call each time.

And they went on in silence through Kirton hamlet, where an old man followed them with his eyes, and perhaps envied them their youth and love; and across the Ivy beck where the mill was splashing and grumbling low thunder to itself in the chequered shadow of the dell, and the miller before the door was beating flour from his hands as he whistled a modulation; and up by the high spinney, whence they saw the mountains upon either hand; and down the hill again to the back courts and offices of Naseby House.

"Those who think so must want it themselves," said Seymour, in a low voice; then, obedient to the beck of one of the presiding nymphs, he hastened to take his share in the performance.

"Yes - trout - small but plenty of 'em - in a beck running close behind the cottage."