238 ASSISTED VISION 



Turning your glass now upon the shore, a great 

 variety of life is revealed. Oyster-catchers are busily 

 running to and fro in showy liveries of black and white, 

 with legs and bills like red sealing-wax ' beaked and 

 rnembered gules,' as the heralds would blazon it. The 

 coloration of birds is a perpetual puzzle. Why should 

 oyster-catchers have such conspicuous plumage, while 

 the redshanks feeding beside and among them, resemble 

 them only in the hue of their bills and feet, the pre- 

 vailing tinge in their plumage being ash-brown? If 

 protective colour have all the advantage claimed for it, 

 how comes it that the gay oyster-catcher seems to 

 fare as well in the battle of life as his dusky com- 

 panions ? 



Of sadder tinge even than the redshanks, dunlins, 

 and sandpipers are the melancholy curlews, of which 

 there are half a dozen down there, thrusting their long 

 curved beaks into the ooze, and dragging out the 

 hideous, but doubtless succulent, lug-worms. They are 

 the most shy of all the plovers, but here, ensconced 

 behind a grey stone wall, you may follow all their 

 movements as minutely as if they were running about 

 on your own drawing-room carpet. They are quaint 

 old-world objects, such as one may imagine moving 

 over the primeval ooze, among giant lizards of pleiocene 

 design lying at unconscionable length in the sun. 

 While you are watching the curlews swish a little 

 bevy of swift birds sweep over the field with a single 

 piping note, shrill and short. It is a vedette from a 

 great army of golden plover in the ploughed lands 



