S8 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



indeed, are some of these men that they will shoot at 

 anything that flies by, even a hooded crow. They do 

 not fire at it for fun — they can't afford to throw away 

 a cartridge: one of them assured me that a crow, stewed 

 with any other bird he might have in the larder — peewit, 

 redshank, curley, or gull — goes down very well when 

 you are hungry. 



Later I go on to the sea, meeting the last of the 

 fishers, or toilers in the sands, returning before dark; 

 men and boys in big boots and heavy wet clothes, 

 burdened with spades and forks and baskets of bait and 

 shell-fish. With slow, heavy feet they trudge past and 

 leave the world to darkness and to me. 



On one of these evenings as I stood on the ridge of 

 the dunes, looking seaward, when the tide was out and 

 the level sands stretched away to the darkening horizon, 

 an elderly woman made her appearance, and had evi- 

 dently come all that way down to give her dog an 

 evening run. Climbing over the ridge, she went down 

 to the beach, where the dog, a big rough-haired terrier, 

 was so delighted with the smooth sands that he began 

 careering round her in wide circles at his utmost speed, 

 barking the while with furious joy. The sound pro- 

 duced an extraordinary effect; it was repeated and 

 redoubled a hundred-fold from all over the flat sands. 

 It was my first experience of an echo of that sort heard 

 from above — perhaps if I had been below there would 

 have been no echo — but I could not understand how it 

 was produced. It was not like other echoes — exact repe- 

 titions of the sounds emitted which come back to us 



