3 68 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



thickly enamelled with frozen splashes, and the beard 

 is hung with icicles, the gunner goes with chest bare 

 to the diaphragm, and rejoices that he is alive. 



The hardest work on Breydon is when the water 

 is thus full of " slub." But it is then that the inland 

 broads are sheets of ice and their winter denizens 

 have been driven down to the still open water. The 

 change of the tide or a sudden breeze will pack the 

 loose particles of ice round one's boat, the contact 

 freezing them into a sheet to which the ice-axe 

 must be taken or a long imprisonment faced. Or 

 a field of more apparent drift-ice may move down 

 on some solid objective, which may be a boat, or 

 even a moored yacht, and in a few minutes pile it 

 yards high. At last Breydon itself freezes. Water- 

 fowl float in safety in lakes surrounded by ice, seldom, 

 though sometimes, molested by resourceful puntsmen, 

 who, at considerable risk, use their boat as a sledge 

 and thus bridge the new defence. For the tides 

 swell under the skin of ice, making it groan and 

 crack into long fissures, and it is only a man both 

 bold and knowing that takes a hand when Neptune 

 and Boreas are fighting for the mastery. When the 

 end comes and open water sweeps up and down 

 Breydon once more, we learn that the depths also 

 have been frozen, and in the " stock ice" that comes 

 up from the bottom are sometimes thousands of dead 

 crabs, and for at least one season the chief pest of 

 the eel-fisher is almost non-existent. So fares the 

 winter through ; and when in early May the cheerful 

 cry of the whimbrel is heard, we feel as we did last 

 year and the year before that spring, after all, is 

 the best of all seasons in Broadland. 



