300 THE WATER-HEM. 



quiet, when the noise ceased. On rising and looking about, he 

 saw a Water-hen busily employed in collecting dry rushes and 

 flags, and laying them one by one over her eggs deposited in 

 one of these bare nests close beside her. It was not long before 

 she had completely hidden them; and then, looking round 

 with a cautious glance, not aware that her motions were 

 observed, softly and silently glided away amongst the reeds 

 and disappeared. On a nearer approach, strange to say, the 

 nest was with difficulty found, and no one who had not pre- 

 viously ascertained its existence was thereabouts could possibly 

 have discovered it. 



We have said that they usually build either upon a level 

 with, or very little raised above the water, but not invariably 

 so for, although almost entirely confined to the water, as their 

 abiding as well as feeding place, they will not only perch on 

 trees when roosting, but even build their nests at a consider- 

 able elevation above the ground. An instance of this occurred 

 in Surrey, where the attention of a person who had landed 

 upon an island in the middle of a large pond, was drawn to a 

 mass of dry rushes, flags, and reeds, strangely heaped together, 

 about twenty feet above the ground, in a spruce fir-tree. Curi- 

 osity induced him to climb up when, to his surprise, out 

 crept a Water-hen, which dropped into the pond and made ofl 

 towards the shore. 



But it is not only in their instinctive attachments and habits 

 that they merit notice ; the following anecdote proves that 

 they are gifted with a sense of observation approaching to 

 something very like reasoning faculties. At a gentleman's 

 house in Staffordshire, the Pheasants are fed out of one of 

 those boxes described in page 281, the lid of which rises with 

 the pressure of the Pheasant standing on the rail in front of 

 the box. A Water-hen, observing this, went and stood upon 

 the rail as soon as the Pheasant had quitted it ; but the weight 

 of the bird being insufficient to raise the lid of the box, so as 

 to enable it to get at the corn, the Water-hen kept jumping 

 on the rail, to give additional impetus to its weight; this 

 partially succeeded, but not to the satisfaction of the sagacious 

 bird. Accordingly it went off, and soon returning with another 



