THE LAKE VILLAGE 193 



snow. Straying in this place, revelling in that wind- 

 waved feathery fairy whiteness all round me, I finally 

 sat down by the water-side to watch and listen. 

 Mallard, moorhen, and water-rail, the last heard 

 though not seen, and little grebe were there, but no 

 unfamiliar sound came to me from the songsters in 

 the sedges and bulrushes or from the osiers and alders. 

 I was perhaps inattentive; mine on this occasion 

 was a wandering mind; I was still suffering from the 

 effect of my interview with Dr. Bulleid; for even the 

 dullest person among us cannot very well spend an 

 hour with an enthusiast without catching something 

 from him — a slight rise in his tepid temperature, 

 a little rose-coloured rash on his skin, which will 

 presently vanish and leave him well again — as sane 

 and healthy a person as he ever was and ever will be 

 to the end of his comfortable, humdrum existence. 

 But just then, with the infection still in me, I was 

 inhabiting two worlds at one and the same time — 

 that dank green marshy world, whitened with cotton- 

 grass, once a great inland lake and before that an 

 estuary which was eventually cut off from the Severn 

 Sea through the silting up of the sand at its mouth. 

 And I was also in that same shallow inland sea or 

 lake, unmoved by tides, which had been growing 

 shallower year by year for centuries with a rank 

 aquatic vegetation spreading over it as far as the eye 

 could see — a green watery world. I could hear the 

 wind in the bulrushes — miles on miles of dark polished 

 stems, tufted with ruddy brown: that low, mysteri- 

 ous sound is to me the most fascinating of all the many 



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