228 BIRD WATCHING 



damp, moist, or marshy, as can well be imagined. 

 The moor-hen went steadily on, with a composed and 

 mind-made-up step, never deviating from the straight 

 line of the netting till, upon coming to where this was 

 continued at a right angle in another direction, it 

 found its way through, and proceeded to cross a 

 green road skirted with fir-trees into another Sahara- 

 like waste, where I lost it, at least a quarter of a mile 

 from the nearest little pond or pool. Possibly it was 

 walking from one of these to another, but quite as 

 probably in my experience it was leaving its 

 ordinary haunts for some inland part it had dis- 

 covered, where it could get food to its liking. For 

 the moor-hens living in the little creek or stream 

 that I used to watch would range over the adjacent 

 meadow-land, and a few of them, having come to 

 the limit of this, would climb up a steep bank and 

 through a hedge at its top, down again into a little 

 bush and bramble-grown patch on the other side. 

 One bird, indeed, that I startled, actually climbed 

 this bank and scrambled through the hedge into 

 the patch, instead of flying to the water ; which 

 is as though a lady were to take up Shakespeare 

 rather than a novel, or a servant-maid to act by 

 reason instead of by rote. Again, I have startled a 

 moor-hen out of a large tree standing in a thicket, 

 and a good way back from the ditch surrounding 

 it such a tree as one might have expected to 

 see a wood-pigeon fly out of, but certainly not a 

 moor-hen. 



Such variations of habit are to me more interesting 

 than those of structure, for they represent the mind, 

 as do the latter which they have probably in most 



