196 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



waved feathery fairy whiteness all round me, I finally 

 sat down by the water-side to watch and listen. 

 Mallard, moorhen, and water-rail, the last heard 

 though not seen, and little grebe were there, but no 

 unfamiliar sound came to me from the songsters in the 

 sedges and bulrushes or from the osiers and alders. 



I was perhaps inattentive ; mine on this occasion 

 was a wandering mind ; I was still suffering from the 

 effect of my interview with Dr. BuUeid ; for even the 

 dullest person among us cannot very well spend an 

 hour with an enthusiast without catching something 

 from him — a slight rise in his tepid temperature, a 

 little rose-coloured rash on his skin, which will presently 

 vanish and leave him well again — as sane and healthy 

 a person as he ever was and ever will be to the end of 

 his comfortable, humdrum existence. But just then, 

 with the infection still in me, I was inhabiting two 

 worlds at one and the same time — that dank green 

 marshy world, whitened with cotton-grass, once a 

 great inland lake and before that an estuary which 

 was eventually cut off from the Severn Sea through 

 the silting up of the sand at its mouth. And I was also 

 in that same shallow inland sea or lake, unmoved by 

 tides, which had been growing shallower year by 

 year for centuries with a rank aquatic vegetation spread- 

 ing over it as far as the eye could see — a green watery 

 world. I could hear the wind in the bulrushes — 

 miles on miles of dark polished stems, tufted with ruddy 

 brown : that low, mysterious sound is to me the most 

 fascinating of all the many voices of the wind. The 



