WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA 27 



the slopes of the sand-hills on the land side and ex- 

 tending from the Wells embankment to Holkham a 

 couple of miles away. Many an hour in the late 

 afternoons and evenings have I spent in that perfect 

 solitude listening to the sea-wind in the pines when 

 the sound of wind and sea were one, and finding the 

 deep shelter warm and grateful after a long ramble 

 over the sands and dunes and marshes. 



For I go not to Wells in " the season," when days 

 are long and the sun is hot, the scattering time for 

 all those who live " too thick," when even into this 

 remote spot drift a few of the pale town-people with 

 books in their pockets and cameras and green butterfly- 

 nets in their hands. The wild geese are not there 

 then, they are away breeding in the Siberian tundra 

 or Spitzbergen ; and for that wild exhilarating 

 clangour which they make when passing overhead to 

 and from the sea, and for the cra-cra of the hooded 

 crow — his harsh war-cry and curse on everything — 

 you hear lark and titlark, dunnock and wren, with 

 the other members of the " feathered choir " even as 

 in all other green places. 



Autumn and winter is my time, and at no other 

 place in the kingdom can the grey geese be seen to 

 better advantage, despite the fact that to this spot 

 the wild-fowler comes annually in numbers, and that 

 many of the natives, even the poorest, possess a gun 

 and are always on the look-out for geese. The birds 

 come in undiminished numbers, probably because 

 they find here the one green spot on which they 



