112 OCTOBER IN BROADLAND. 



Grood tasty heron, hot potatoes, mushrooms from the marshes, garden beet from 

 the cultivated patch surrounding, boiled pike and potted eel, and a f whopper ' 

 of a blackberry pie to finish with. What more need we say of them? Jim 

 Trett brings forth from his memory-locker many a stirring adventure, for there 

 are such to be met with in Broadland, much that is interesting about fish and bird 

 and animal, about shooting swans and snaring pike, ferreting and trapping, 

 and what not ! Several pages in the ' folk-lore diary ' are scribbled full, as the 

 good man plies his yarn, whilst the old lady keeps dropping her knitting upon 

 her lap to listen, for, long after our appetites are satisfied does the chat continue. 



Behold us, just in time at the Broadland Station but for ' narber ' Cubitt's 

 1 dickey,' we might have missed our train. The wheel had been replaced, the 

 vagrant litch-pin readjusted, and both Cubitt an.d the trap had undergone a 

 sousing. And couldn't that little ' dickey ' spin along ! 



Next day's flood-tide finds us leaving our boat-house at the entrance of 

 far-famed Breydon. Our craft is a characteristic Norfolk punt, our business the 

 slaughtering of the innocents; but not so much that, perhaps, as observation. 

 October ushers in the great migratorial movement of the birds. All our summer- 

 birds have reached warmer lands by the second week of it; their places have been 

 filled by the hardier races from the more hostile north. Snowbuntings, twites, 

 larks, wax wings, and a host of other land-birds, most as common, and many rarer, 

 usurp our woodlands, meadows, and wastelands where the cuckoo, wheat ear, chiff- 

 chaff, and others dwelt in summer-time; our mud-flats and sandy sea-shores resound 

 with the varied cries of wading birds, and the estuary waters are lively with the 

 wild fowl that float upon them. We cannot enter into this interesting subject, 

 for a volume alone would cover it. 



* The ' flats ' will soon be covered. Great ' grey ' gulls and immature, of the 

 blackheaded species, with a sprinkling of others, winnow their way to and fro, 

 snatching up fragments of fish and grease floating on the surface of the brown 

 waters. Yonder stalks a grey heron small flounders and juvenile shorecrabs 

 suit him just as well as the frogs and roach of fresher waters. 



Much might be said of the gradual change which has been creeping over 

 Breydon during half-a-century. In the early part of it a number of men gained 

 a fairly remunerative living by shooting the teal and widgeon and pochards that 



