APPENDIX: NO. LIX. 89 
places with Ledum palustre, Vaccinium uliginosum, Andromeda poli- 
folia, Rubus chamemorus, besides grasses, Carices, mosses, and other 
plants. There were also a few bushes or treelets of the common 
birch, and these quite numerous in some parts of the marsh. 
Walking along one of these strips, in a direction where the pair 
of Cranes was said to be often heard, I came upon a nest which 
I was sure must be a Crane’s. I saw one bit of down. The nest 
was made of very small twigs mixed with long sedgy grass ; 
altogether several inches in depth, and perhaps two feet across. 
In it were two lining-membranes of eggs, and on searching amongst 
the materials of the nest I found fragments of the shells. We had 
not gone many yards beyond this place, when I saw a Crane stalking 
In a direction across us amongst some small birch trees, now 
appearing to stoop a little, and now holding its head and neck boldly 
up as it steadily advanced. Presently the lads called out to me that 
they had found some young Cranes. As I ran towards them, a 
Crane, not the one I had previously seen, rose just before me from 
among some bushes which were only two or three feet high, and not 
twenty yards from the place where the lads had been shouting 
at least for a minute or two. It rose into the air in a burried, 
frightened way. There was nothing just at the spot where it got up, 
neither eggs nor young. I then went up to where the two little 
Cranes were found. ‘They were standing upright and walking about 
with some facility, and making a rather loud “ cheeping”’ ery. 
They seemed as if they could have left such eggs as Cranes were 
supposed ‘to lay only a very few days. I say supposed, for in 
England we know nothing of the eggs which are called Cranes’, 
but which may have come from any part of the world. They were 
straiglitly made: little things, short in the beak, livid in the eye, 
thick in the knees, covered with a moderately long chestnut or 
tawny-coloured down, darker on the upper parts, softening away 
into paler underneath. As I fondled one of them it began to peck 
playfully at my hands and legs, and when at length I rose to go 
away, it walked after me, taking me as I supposed for one of its 
long-legged parents. 1 had only just before been plucking from 
it some bits of down to keep; for, valuable as I knew it to be in a 
natural-history point of view, I could not make up my mind to take 
its life. As soon as I saw its inclination to follow, I took to double- 
quick time, and left it far behind. Its confidence was the more 
remarkable, as, all the time we were with it, the old Cranes were 
flying round*near the ground at some distance from us, their necks 
and feet fully stretcbed out as usual, but with a remarkable sudden 
casting up of their wings in a direction over the back after each 
downward stroke, in place of the ordinary steady movement. At 
the same time they were making a peculiar kind of low clattering 
or somewhat gurgling noise, of which it is very difficult to give 
an intelligible description, and now and then they broke out into a 
loud trumpeting call not unlike their grand ordinary notes, which, 
audible at so great a distance, gladden the ears of the lover of 
