AUGUST IN A BREYDON PUNT 181 



he is the next moment swallowed. A But we must prepare for breakfast, 

 score or so of these hungry gulls will You feel like having a dip ? I cannot 

 make off with a peck of these abundant recommend one, for the mud is soft 

 creatures in a couple of hours' hunting, and the water is hardly so pure as you 

 The tide is perceptibly rising on find it in the sea. Get out on the 

 the flats. Turn your eye to the south- rond and I will dash a bucket or two 

 east, and you will observe the water of it over you : and then while you 

 spreading, finger-like, over the mud, are lighting the fire for the coffee and 

 lifting the grasses as it expands ; now bacon I'll trot round the marshes 

 one finger joins another, and drain and hunt up, if possible, a few mush- 

 overflows to drain. In a couple of rooms ; and bring some eggs from 

 hours' time there will be sufficient Banham's farm. Banham and his men 

 covering everywhere to float off all are already busy turning over the 

 wading birds shorter legged than the swathes of marsh hay hard by the 

 redshanks. They will probe and potter railway yonder. 



about until belly-deep, and will then Breakfast over, we take a stroll 

 hie away to the Bure-side, until the along the walls, and drop in upon Fred 

 ebb has sufficiently fallen to bare Clarke, the gunner, at the far end of the 

 again the area immediately in front " big " rond, for a yarn on birds and 

 of us. Yonder fly three young mallard Breydon. Fred spends most of his 

 of the year ; hard behind them follows time on Breydon, and seldom goes 

 a sheld-duck. Considering that sheld- home but to dispose of his eels or 

 ducks breed in the northern part of wild-fowl, and to replenish his stock 

 the county, and that they love the of water, bread, and powder. A man 

 univalves the Hydrobia ulva, and one of his kidney is worth gossiping with, 

 or two allied forms that swarm the for there are stored away in his mind 

 semi-marine vegetation it is strange much Nature-lore, and many interesting 

 we do not see this species more fre- reminiscences of sport and adventure, 

 quently. Seventeen is the greatest We put to flight a number of linnets 

 number I have seen at one time here, that are feeding among the luxuriant 

 but small parties occasionally drop Chenopodium album that always flour- 

 in ; and young shovellers now and ishes on a newly-topped " wall," and 

 then visit us in early autumn. here assumes a trailing habit. And 



the sudden flight from a grassy tuft 



