228 BIRD WATCHING 



damp, moist, or marshy, as can well be imagined. 

 The moor-hen went steadily on, with a composed and 

 mind-made-up step, never deviating from the straight 

 line of the netting till, upon coming to where this was 

 continued at a right angle in another direction, it 

 found its way through, and proceeded to cross a 

 green road skirted with fir-trees into another Sahara- 

 like waste, where I lost it, at least a quarter of a mile 

 from the nearest little pond or pool. Possibly it was 

 walking from one of these to another, but quite as 

 probably — in my experience — it was leaving its 

 ordinary haunts for some inland part it had dis- 

 covered, where it could get food to its liking. For 

 the moor-hens living in the little creek or stream 

 that I used to watch would range over the adjacent 

 meadow-land, and a few of them, having come to 

 the limit of this, would climb up a steep bank and 

 through a hedge at its top, down again into a little 

 bush and bramble-grown patch on the other side. 

 One bird, indeed, that I startled, actually climbed 

 this bank and scrambled through the hedge into 

 the patch, instead of flying to the water ; which 

 is as though a lady were to take up Shakespeare 

 rather than a novel, or a servant-maid to act by 

 reason instead of by rote. Again, I have startled a 

 moor-hen out of a large tree standing in a thicket, 

 and a good way back from the ditch surrounding 

 it — such a tree as one might have expected to 

 see a wood-pigeon fly out of, but certainly not a 

 moor-hen. 



Such variations of habit are to me more interesting 

 than those of structure, for they represent the mind, 

 as do the latter — which they have probably in most 



