WINTER DAYS ON BREYDON 21 



the fiercest winter, there are cabbages, anyway, that can 

 always be had for the looking for, and which, besides, provide 

 famous shelter. My boots crisply brushed off the frost dust 

 from the thistle-stems, the remnants of the goosefoot, and the 

 clinging wall-grasses as I strode along. 



The tide was near the full and heaved, as if sighing, under 

 the rough mantle of ice upon the bosom of Breydon, while 

 the creases in her vesture were marked here and there by the 

 swollen " drains," over which the ice lay thinner and weaker, 

 and crackling. Their sinuous windings were lost in the rimy 

 atmosphere which joined, as it were, with the grey ice in a 

 close and indistinct horizon ; range of vision was limited at 

 most to a hundred paces. The sun, like a disc of Naples 

 yellow, seemed to be trying to pierce the chilly curtain ; it 

 looked dully bright, as one sees it through smoked glass. 

 Scarcely a sound broke on the still air, save an occasional 

 sharp crackling of ice, the weird cry of some bewildered bird, 

 and the yet rarer boom of a fowling-piece, which left one sur- 

 mising whether a coot, or a wigeon, or a tufted duck had 

 fallen to, or had escaped the shooter. A large gull loomed up 

 indistinctly, as one sees a noctule bat at eventide ; it vanished 

 as imperceptibly. A chaffinch, bright and saucy, settled for a 

 moment upon a straggling willow stick thrust out from a 

 broken fish-swill, adding by his presence the finishing touch 

 to an artistic tit-bit I could not help admiring the dilapi- 

 dated basket, with its ragged fringe of weed, thrown by the 

 tide against a gnarled stake upon which the frost had drawn 

 leaves and foliage of white, together with some loose flint- 

 stones from the wall, in the hollows of which bright orange 

 and yellow lichens were growing, formed a background to the 

 picture. A fitting tail-piece, I thought, for any sketch of a 

 frost-bound estuary. 



Some footprints upon the whitened surface of the ditch, 

 below the walls, described to me how that morning some 

 roving spaniel had been out sporting with his master. Look- 

 ing more closely at them I observed that they zigzagged in 

 conformity with some tinier " spoor " ; these dotted imprints, 

 and a fine-drawn line between them, told how the dog had 

 followed the perambulations of a rat. The footprints of the 

 rat suddenly turned at a right angle and ended in the wall, 

 the dog's continuing alone. A hooded crow had left his 



