198 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



one in England, including the student of the poetry of 

 that period, who can say with his hand on his heart 

 that he has read the whole of " Polyolbion " — every 

 twelve-foot line of its many thousands, each line 

 laboriously dragging its slow length along ? It is hard 

 to read even the hundred lines descriptive of the fens 

 except for the picture conjured up of those marvellous 

 bird gatherings. It was Lincolnshire's boast, according 

 to Drayton, that no such abundance could be seen in 

 any other part of the kingdom. I imagine that there 

 was an even greater abundance and variety in the 

 Somerset lake of prehistoric times. It was a better 

 climate, a more sheltered district, and birds must have 

 been far more numerous in the ages before man found 

 out how to slay them at long distances with guns and 

 to frighten them with smoke and flame and a noise like 

 thunder. 



Now, with Drayton's picture in my mind and many 

 old memories of immense congregations of wild fowl 

 in the lakes and marshes of a distant region, witnessed 

 in my early years but nevermore to be seen, I could 

 reconstruct the past. Indeed, for a little space, while 

 the infection lasted, I was there afloat on that endless 

 watery wilderness as it appeared to the lake dweller of, 

 say, twenty-five centuries ago. The lake dweller him- 

 self was with me, poling and paddling his long canoe by 

 devious ways over the still waters, by miles and leagues 

 of grey rushes and sedges vivid green, and cat's-tail 

 and flowering rush and vast dark bulrush beds and 

 islets covered with thickets of willow and alder and 



