42 By Leafy Ways. 



greater. No bird can pass him on the airy highway. 

 His speed has been estimated at no less than two 

 hundred and forty miles an hour. A wonderful per- 

 formance, truly, for a bird whose weight although its 

 curved and narrow wings measure as much as eighteen 

 inches across from tip to tip does not quite reach an 

 ounce ! 



Most of the birds that for half the year haunt the 

 sea-shore retire to a distance to breed ; some to upland 

 moors inland, some to Norway ; some travel even as 

 far as Siberia before they find a spot to suit them. 



A few, however, remain, and the ringed plover, for 

 example, not unfrequently brings up her family on the 

 edge of her native beach. She makes no nest. In a 

 little hollow in the shingle above high-water mark are 

 arranged, with perfect symmetry, four rather sharply- 

 pointed eggs, which, tinged with pale buff and splashed 

 with brown and gray, match so well with their sur- 

 roundings that they easily escape the eye. 



All along the shore rise in broken outlines the 

 picturesque sandhills, among whose rustling sedges the 

 evening primrose and great sea convolvulus bloom. 

 Clumps of sea-holly, yellow poppies, white patches of 

 campion and masses of golden stonecrop relieve with 

 their varied tints the monotonous piles of gray shingle, 

 strewn with dry sea-wrack, fragments of shells, broken 

 spars, and all the strange flotsam and jetsam of an 

 ocean beach. 



A wide sweep of ribbed and yellow sand, palpitating 



