24 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



wild geese, mallards, water-rails, teal, curlews, 

 coots, snipe, bitterns, moor-hens, and various kinds 

 of plover, and many remain to breed. 



The wild scene which opens up to the sky on 

 every side suggests the past and the history of the 

 past at almost every point on which the eye rests. 

 Yet one walks far through this country in the early 

 summer noonday without encountering any human 

 creature. It might be nature in her primeval 

 mood, so silent is the landscape. In the prevailing 

 stillness one becomes gradually conscious of only 

 one sound which seems to haunt the footsteps. The 

 cause of it must be in the distant wood in front, but 

 there is no one when you arrive. It must be in the 

 open space beyond and you expect to see figures 

 in the fields and busy men at work, but you emerge 

 again and still there is no one. The sound is as 

 difficult to define as it is to localize. It suggests 

 now the hum of machinery or again the distant 

 bleating of goats, or yet again the subdued con- 

 verse of people close at hand at work. But there 

 is never any one, and it remains a whispering sound 

 always about one in the air. 



A snipe, uttering its sharp tscaaap, tscaap, rises 

 from the heather, and now another, and you look 

 long in the coarse grass for a nest. The carrion crow 

 has been busy, and the traces of broken shells 

 strewn in the marsh mark his work. At length a 

 nest is found containing eggs. It is the slightest 

 of structures, a few grass stalks in a dry depression 

 in the ground. The four beautiful, almost invisible 

 eggs, like all others in the open, bear the imprint 

 of their surroundings in their protective colouring. 

 Olive-tinted they are, but with unusually large peat- 



