Winter Visitors. 145 



and widgeon ; companies even of the great whooping 

 swan, whose mighty pinions sound so strangely as 

 they pass by night ; vast crowds of snipe, greenshanks, 

 dotterels, plovers perhaps even a few phalarope, are 

 borne along with the waves of the great inroad. 



From our own moorlands, as well as from remoter 

 breeding stations, comes down the curlew, at the 

 sound of whose plaintive cry you will put in a wire 

 cartridge, and lie down in your boat. 



Armies of ducks, frozen out of their Arctic feeding 

 grounds, settle down on the brown waters of broad 

 river mouths. 



On every muddy shore flocks of sandpipers, re- 

 turned from their haunts by the Polar Sea, gather into 

 clouds that sail up and down the wintry beach with 

 musical and mournful cries. 



Now they stand out a myriad points of silver on the 

 cold grey heaven ; now they are lost again as they 

 wheel with the precision of a troop of cavalry; now 

 'they pour along like a fire that sweeps the whole 

 earth before it ;' now they settle down on the shore 

 and run this way and that probing the mud with their 

 long bills in search of food, and leaving mazes of light 

 footprints on the yielding surface. 



Flights of woodcocks, suddenly descending like a 

 waterspout from their airy highway, alight spent and 

 breathless on the land. Then scattering over the 

 country they return to their haunts of the previous 

 autumn. 



10 



