IN DUTCH WATER MEADOWS 199 



figured an undiscovered antelope; 1 the rare Flat- 

 nosed, Two-horned Rhinoceros; a Great Auk in good 

 preservation ; a huge and almost perfect Epiornis egg, 

 bought from a Frenchman for a thousand guilders 

 in our money about 80 something less than a third 

 of the price paid not long ago for an Auk's egg sold by 

 auction at Stevens's rooms. 



After a five-o'clock table d'hote, with a menu to 

 remind us that we had crossed the Channel, a water 

 souchet of Perch with resplendent fins, served with 

 boiled parsley, Chicken with compote de fruits, etc., we 

 had made the most of the remaining hours of daylight 

 by driving out beside canals and ditches glorified by a 

 golden sunset, and through copses ringing with the 

 songs of Ictarine Warblers and Nightingales, to see a 

 Stork's nest, the pride of a neighbouring village. It 

 was on a cartwheel on a high pole in a meadow, near 

 the church, carefully fenced in. Both birds were at 

 home. As we came up, the female, who was ' sitting,' 

 lifted her head for a minute, and, coming to the con- 

 clusion that we were harmless, settled down again. 

 Her mate rose and sailed slowly round the meadow, to 

 return again very soon, and when we drove off stood on 

 one leg, a feathered St. Simeon Stylites on his column, 

 sharp cut in purple shadow above the trees, beside the 

 low-spired tower, against the evening sky. 



1 A figure of the Banded Bush Buck, with horns and hoofs judiciously 

 hidden by foliage, as neither of the skins had heads or legs, was 

 published in 1841 in the Zoologia Typica, by Louis Fraser, naturalist 

 to the Niger Expedition. 



