NIGHTS ON THE WATER 77 



chenopodiums and reeds and sedges. The duckweed- 

 thickened ditches teem with life. Even small roach, many 

 a fat eel, and here and there a stunted pike flash among the 

 crowded horsetails, water-plantains, hornwort, and other 

 ditch plants : all of them enjoying life the more for taking 

 it. Frog and stickleback are engulfed in the trap-jaws 

 of hungry pike ; mayflies and many another May insect 

 emerging from their pupae-cases are food for little roach or 

 passing swallow, martin, and wagtail, whom the chirping 

 meadow-pipit joins to help in the general slaughter. 



At nightfall the cuckoo, who even finds out the swinging 

 cradle of the sedge-warbler, has retired to a tree branch to 

 rest ; the goatsuckers come to the old willow on the other 

 side of the 'wall.' Ghost moths do not heed his churning 

 warning, and with many another night-loving insect go down 

 his wide jaws. 



There creep out from their burrows in the ' wall ' the 

 furry little water-voles. These plunge into the shallows, 

 thick with watercress, and undoubtedly sample any small 

 insect, floating moth, and struggling dragon-fly, busily pulling 

 itself out of its glove of a pupae-case, just as the water-shrews 

 'plumped' in and seized others by daylight. But here the 

 water-voles take by choice the long, thick grass stalks, cutting 

 them off with gardener-like deftness with their large yellow 

 incisors. Then sitting up, ' waist deep ' on the margin, they 

 nibble them up to the merest remnant, passing the succulent 

 blades through their handlike fore paws as might their 

 relatives, the squirrels. 



Such sights and sounds may any observer enjoy who 

 loafs through the long warm day, and continues his vigil 

 through the silent night hours, until the marsh mists vanish 

 in a new day's sunbeams, when the sky in the east turns 

 from deepest blue to palest green, when the stars grow dim, 



