GEESE 213 



returned no more ; but whether they met their 

 death from duck and swan shooters in the marshes, 

 or had followed the great river down to the sea, 

 forgetting their home, was never known. For 

 about a year after they had ceased going back, 

 small flocks were occasionally seen in the marshes, 

 very wild and strong on the wing, but even these, 

 too, vanished at last. 



It is probable that, but for powder and shot, the 

 domestic goose of Europe, by occasionally taking 

 to a feral life in thinly-settled countries, would 

 ere this have become widely distributed over the 

 earth. 



And one wonders if in the long centuries running 

 to thousands of years, of tame flightless existence, 

 the strongest impulse of the wild migrant has been 

 wholly extinguished in the domestic goose ? We 

 regard him as a comparatively unchangeable species, 

 and it is probable that the unexercised faculty is 

 not dead but sleeping, and would wake again in 

 favourable circumstances. The strength of the 

 wild bird's passion has been aptly described by 

 Miss Dora Sigerson in her little poem, " The Flight 

 of the Wild Geese." The poem, oddly enough, is 

 not about geese but about men wild Irishmen 

 who were called Wild Geese ; but the bird's power- 



