WINTER DAYS ON BREYDON 13 



The moods of winter on this great tidal water are many, 

 and Breydon must be visited day after day to see them all. 

 There is the bright, crisp, frosty morning, when the air is keen, 

 and hoar-frost sparkles on the grass-topped walls, and glitters 

 on the ragged fish-basket left by the tide on the rond 

 below. Then there comes the day of drizzle and rain-storm, 

 with big, cumbrous, leaden clouds, molten and chilling, driving 

 before the west wind like floating continents, dented and broken 

 and rifted sometimes with peaks, and capes, and mountains of 

 snowy white and sickly yellow. On such days the very crows 

 wear a more bedraggled air as they skulk along by the 

 " walls," seeking a dinner of carrion, and the gulls sit hunched 

 up on the flats with a woe-begone air. Then the snow-time 

 comes in a wall of cloud with which the north wind covers 

 up all Nature, as with a pall, and one cannot see beyond the 

 fleecy fringing that surrounds him. Such are the days one 

 experiences on Breydon from the time that winter steals on 

 us till its reluctant departure in boisterous March. 



IN FOGGY WEATHER 



On a foggy day we take our first ramble along the southern 

 wall. The slight frost of the morning has been succeeded by 

 a raw and chilling wind that drove in the fog-bank ; and 

 the apex of the wall has softened into greasy mud that 

 burdens our feet with layer upon layer of sticky clay, and 

 which, in spite of the moisture on the wall-grasses, refuses to 

 be brushed off. On our right is the channel, whose farther- 

 most side we can but dimly discern : on our left the marshes 

 are soon lost in the grey gloom. A fieldfare or two are dis- 

 consolately hopping among the fresh-cast mole-heaps for any 

 stray beetle which may have hastened upwards at the mole's 

 coming; and an occasional meadow-pipit darts from the 

 ditch-side on seeing us, twittering its surprise or displeasure 

 at being disturbed from its quest of the Sphceromidce or 

 Hydrobia which are clinging to ditchweeds, or climbing the 

 broken reed-stems in their seemingly purposeless peregrina- 

 tions. 



The wall-rats the vilest of a vile race, which make their 

 home in the banks of Breydon, and seek their living on the 



