HARBINGE'RS 13 



than any English sea is the back of our kingfisher. 

 It is a living lapis lazuli that goes threading the aisles 

 of the beech stems to a perch that seems to him safer, 

 but where he glows in his orange-bronze breast almost 

 as brightly as in his blue of flight. He, the halcyon, 

 is a harbinger, for he fled this place when he was in 

 danger of being frozen out (and his prey frozen in), 

 and his return means that in his valuable judgment 

 spring has come to stay. 



The pool contains another returned native, or rather, 

 two a pair of dabchicks that the place has not known 

 since late October. Now that their great migration 

 flight is over (for the estuary where they spent the 

 winter is thirty miles away), they have folded their 

 wings for many a month. You can scarcely persecute 

 a dabchick into flying from its summer pool, and 

 practically never see it on the wing throughout the 

 summer. Walking is an art that it has almost entirely 

 forgotten, so that the pool itself contains its active 

 life from now till the autumn. When an inexperienced 

 bird selects an unworthy pool that dries up early in 

 the year, it still remains, as helpless as a fish, in spite 

 of the wings that have borne it so bravely over miles 

 of land. A pair of boys can chase it up and down, 

 over and under water, run it to a stand, and kill it for 

 the sake of its tiny breast of grebe. No woman 

 decrees the murder her grebe toque comes from a 

 larger member of the genus ; the boy lives more 

 closely to the dictates of barbarism by wearing the 

 trophy himself. Happily, the dabchicks of our pond 

 are safe except from the gunner, and he is not allowed 

 to walk in this wood. 



With a gallantry that is not uncommon among 



