"TRESPASSERS" 117 



sunlight it intercepted, until at last their lofty crests 

 take the directer rays, and are content. Beneath a 

 great spreading beech an exclusive company of ten 

 Great-tits, buried in the thick carpet of fallen leaves, 

 tossed them overhead and aside as they searched 

 the ground below. From time to time one sprang 

 up on to a branch, and holding a beech nut down 

 hammered it for a moment, then let it fall, being 

 mindful of more succulent insect morsels to be had 

 beneath the leafy carpet to which he at once returned. 

 On the next grassy tongue of land a score of Coots 

 and Moorhens dabbled and fed ; and, mixing with 

 them, Mallards cropped the herbage with low-quacked 

 satisfaction. Shyer than these, a flotilla of some fifty 

 Tufted Ducks, ceasing from diving by the reeds, 

 moved out to the open water little black craft with 

 snow-white paddle-boxes, so ordered and stately in 

 their progress that one could have imagined them to 

 be attached to some floating framework that bore 

 them out each in its place, unmoved. Further out 

 on the water a few Herring-gulls flew and settled 

 and flew again with querulous cries : the sea was 

 thirty miles away. Beside us, on a low thorn, a 

 Ringdove, with puffed breast and head drawn in, sat 

 dozing, a strange hunched-up figure, the white 

 patch on whose throat became distinct only when, at 

 the report of a still distant gun, the bird cut back like 

 a flash over the thorn and away to high covert on 

 the farther side of the water. 



For a long time we had been sitting there noting 

 all these trivial, but pleasant things, when, upon 

 glancing at the base of a tree ten paces from me, I 

 noticed for the first time another hunched form. 



