352 DUCK SHOOTING. 



his crooked gray fences disfigured each landscape, 

 these rice fields were the homes of innumerable wild 

 creatures. 



On their borders the herons built their nests, and in 

 the open waters, among the stalks, they did their fish- 

 ing. In and out among the stems, the wild ducks and 

 grebes swam in daily journeyings, while the rails and 

 the coots ran or waded or climbed among the stalks, 

 undisturbed. Here the muskrat had his home, living, 

 in the summer, perhaps, in a hole on some higher piece 

 of ground, and, in winter, building for himself, from 

 the reeds and the stems of the rice, a house, solid, sub- 

 stantial, and impervious to the cold. Here, too, lived 

 the mink, taking his daily toll of fish or frogs from the 

 water, sometimes killing the muskrat, and, now and 

 then, feasting greedily on the eggs or the young of 

 some bird, whose nest he had despoiled. 



Among the rice or the reeds, the blackbirds built 

 their hanging nests of grass, supported by three or four 

 natural columns, and all through the heat of the June 

 days the mother bird brooded her pale blue, black- 

 streaked eggs, swinging easily to the. movement of the 

 rice stems, like the sailor in his hammock at sea. More 

 solid and substantial were the houses built by the 

 marsh wrens ; round balls of grass, deftly woven about 

 a stalk of the rice, roofed over as well as floored, and 

 with only a narrow hole for the passage in and out of 

 the tiny owner. Sometimes a single pair built half a 

 dozen of these nests, near one another, before making a 

 habitation that pleased them, and those that they had 



