BRITISH BIRDS AND BIRD LOVERS. 187 



which is traversed here and there by a flitting sunbeam he has 

 no sense of solitude when alone here with his feathered friends. 

 The common pipit flutters in front of him, that most character- 

 istic bird of mountain and moorland; the dottrel and the 

 golden plover in his summer plumage wing their way high above 

 their nests ; the dunlin or " plover's page," as it is sometimes 

 called, also in its nuptial black-belted attire, rises before him, 

 while the wheat-ear flirts his tail on every boulder that lies in 

 his path. As he gains the crest of the granite fells, a raven 

 slowly flaps up with gorged maw and hoarse croaks of alarm 

 from the carcase of a sheep below him on the broken rocks, 

 the buzzard floats in mid air adown the precipices, or its bolder 

 kinsman the little merlin dashes off the cairn which holds its 

 nest. When he dips down the low-lying valleys white-collared 

 ousels rise from the mountain side, and the curlew screams as 

 it hurries over the boggy reach where cotton grass waves and 

 many a white and yellow saxifrage blooms to charm the 

 botanist. In these districts the ornithologist sees another side 

 of bird life, the freedom and careless audacity of the mountain 

 birds when bringing up their young. Delighted at being thus 

 admitted to the domestic life of so many species generally met 

 in very different localities, and oblivious of hunger and fatigue, 

 the ornithologist, if any one, can fully enter into the varied 

 beauties of such a walk. The ordinarily wild birds, now com- 

 paratively tamed by solitude and nesting cares, harmonize with 

 the stag moss and other Alpine plants flowering like a crown 

 for the majestic mountains. Their notes of alarm do but serve 

 to intensify the mystic strangeness of the scene, through which 

 the bird lover roams delighted, as a favoured mortal might 

 ramble in fairy land. 



Let him now descend to the valleys, to the low ground be- 

 low the last tarn, where the thin sod trembles under his foot, 

 and tall sedges and hillocks of marsh plants diversify a wide 

 expanse of shallow water. Here, if it be late autumn, Virgil's 



