28o BIRDS, BEASTS, AND FISHES 



weather is coming from the frozen north ; for as the white 

 outriders of an Arctic storm sweep across the North Seas, 

 these birds arrive in great flocks — describing a beautiful de- 

 corative pattern upon the blue — and flying towards the stars, 

 they start off at the leader's signal, and go where frosts are 

 not, seeking a serener clime. And the marshland knows 

 them no more until the weather breaks up, and the frozen 

 rivers, dikes, and broads are loosed, when they suddenly 

 return to their pastures — always new. Thus, if the winter 

 be hard as that of 1890-91, for months together never a 

 piwipe is seen until the ice breaks up and the amorous 

 frogs begin to croak in the swamps ; then they all come 

 bustling back to the sere marshes. But it is late ere 

 they begin to tumble and make cocks' nests on the flats. 

 Sweet is their melancholy cry resounding in the mutter of 

 the sea — a voice that should be protected and encouraged, 

 for the farmer's sake, to reproduce itself; but the citizen, 

 with round belly, has eke taken a fancy to a crystalline 

 white and a mealy yolk enclosed in a dark brown blotched 

 shell, and so the birds are robbed, and so the native piwipe 

 is being wiped out of the land, and the immigrants do not 

 taste as sweet as a young native. Ask any gunner, or try 

 yourself; for a good plump young native bird of the year is 

 a treat too good for any gourmand of plovers' eggs ; 'tis a 

 treat for ^.friand, and may you be one. 



