STOCK-DOVES, WOOD-PIGEONS, SNIPE 47 



ceremonie — and makes as though to fly away. But 

 having gone only a little distance, with quick strokes 

 of the wings, it rests upon their expanded surface, 

 and, in a lovely easy sweep, sails round again in the 

 direction from whence it started. It passes beyond 

 the place, the wings now again pulsating, then makes 

 another wide sweep of grace and comes down near 

 where it was before. In a little it again rises, again 

 sweeps and circles, and again descends in the neigh- 

 bourhood. Another now appears, flying towards it, 

 and as it passes over where the first is sitting, this 

 one rises into the air to meet it. They approach, 

 glide from each other, again approach, and thus 

 alternately widening and narrowing the distance 

 between them, one at length goes down, the other 

 passing on to alight, at last, at that distance which 

 the etiquette of the affair prescribes. This circling 

 flight on swiftly resting wings is most beautiful. The 

 pausing sweep, the lazy onwardness, the marriage, as 

 it were, of rest and speed is a delicious thing, another 

 sense, a delicate purged voluptuousness, a very ban- 

 quet to the eye." Such beauty - flights are almost 

 always in the early morning, when appreciative 

 persons are mostly in bed, seen only by the dull 

 eye of some warrener walking to find and kill the 

 beasts that have lain tortured in his traps all night, 

 exciting (if any) but a murderous thought at the 

 time, with the after-reflection, " If I'd a had a gun 



now " 



Stock-doves, as is well known, often choose rabbit- 

 burrows to lay their eggs in, and, having regard to 

 their powers of flight and arborial aptitudes, it might 

 be thought that but for the rabbits they would never 



