Little birdie

Usage examples of tomtit.

It MIGHT have been useful had she kept it to tie up currant bushes with, when it would have served the double purpose of supporting the branches and frightening away the birds--for it is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

Mary Straton whose father chased me and Beany when we broke the gaslite, can run faster then enny of the fellers xcept Tomtit and Arthur Francis.

Quiet reigned in the forest, the lark was singing in the sky above the clearing, the hollow pecking of a woodpecker was heard and the tomtits darting among the drooping branches of the felled trees angrily twittered to each other.

The branches parted, and two boys, alert, like a couple of inquisitive tomtits ready to dart off in an instant, cautiously, hand in hand, approached Alexei.

In that sport, so attractive even to grown people, in which the bird-catcher inveigles the birds to light upon a tree set with limed twigs, by imi tating the cry of the jay or the owlet,—birds which, among the plumed tribe, enjoy the bitter hatred of the whole species, and to such an extent that every sparrow, every finch or tomtit, hastens at the call in the hope of plucking out a single feather from the common enemy, and, for the most, leave all their own,—Pitou's companions either made use of a natural owlet or a natural jay, or with some particular plant formed a pipe, by aid of which they managed to imitate indifferently the cry of either the one or the other of these birds.

It is probable that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal about the chief justice.