76 SPRING 



The lapwings, whose mates are still sitting in their 

 'scrabs' on some low-lying marsh, or in some rut of a clover 

 meadow, flit down to the lower marshes at nightfall. The so- 

 called sportsmen, now happily debarred of free access to the 

 marshes, used to call these movements ' flighting,' and these 

 well-marked lines of flight ' leads.' The strange squeal heard 

 on a dark night or across the beauty of the moonlight, leaves 

 one with a sense not only of the loneliness of the wide 

 plateau, but with a certain feeling of companionableness 

 also. 



The kine lie lazily around at night-time, and the sound of 

 their cud-chewing makes the strangeness familiar. Where a 

 few scrappy clumps of reeds spring up in the 'cut,' saving an 

 utter rigidity of margin, a sedge-warbler chatters out his love 

 tale. In the clump on the ' low,' a stone's throw off, he has 

 a little nest fixed like a New Guinea nigger's hut, upon a 

 scaffolding : as the reeds grow upwards that nest will go up 

 with them, and by the time the baby birds have made their 

 way into the world, they will be swinging in a bed-cradle to 

 the lullaby of the night winds. The swallows that flitted 

 around in the daytime at night roost in the old pump-mill, on 

 a projecting nail, or rough oaken beam edge, or on a cog- 

 wheel. In niches in the wall where soft bricks crumbled, 

 their nests are stuck as half-circles or less, or even as saucers 

 in shape, as caprice prompted. When the little ones come 

 to be feathered, and make their first essays at flight, one now 

 and then errs in approaching the oily cogwheels, which 

 enshroud them with misfortune as with bird lime. In the 

 daytime they flitted around the reed-patches, whipped up 

 insects struggling on the stream, and toyed merrily high 

 aloft. The sand-martins dropped in on a friendly call, for 

 a share in the common prey of moths and flies and other 

 abundant species, that danced around the rank thistles and 



