nook

Mrs. Fluent was nooked with their hostess in the corner of another, a retiring woman, remarkably pretty withal, as your ministers' wives generally are, and no wonder, since the ministers, if at all popular, usually have their pick among the young lambs — we mean the young ladies — of their flocks.

The city of Gotham is an island, as we have said; and once it was a beautiful island, affording to the gaze of him who sailed along its shores, an agreeable mixture of rock and grove, topping hill and marshiy low ground, spakling here and there with the villas or country-houses of the wealthy Gothamites, mostly built of wood painted white, and adorned with long verandahs quite encircling them; or showing at some turn a humbler, but substantial abode, nooked under a mighty horse-chestnut, the headquarters of a milk-farm, with cattle (whose tinkling bells you could hear in the still evening) grazing on its wild up-hilly pasture-land.