214 BIRDS, BEASTS, AND FISHES 



the eggs were slow to accumulate. Sometimes three days 

 passed between the laying of the eggs. Tis the same with 

 the French and English partridge. When the seven eggs 

 were laid, the first proved, as usual, the smallest of the 

 batch, though it weighed exactly a pound, and measured 

 nine and a half inches in circumference, and was nearly five 

 inches long, and green with digested subaqueous lime and 

 vegetable matter upon which they feed. If robbed dis- 

 creetly, they will lay as many as twelve eggs. The fenmen, 

 who rob their nests and eat their eggs, steal upon them in 

 the half-light, and quietly push the hissing, flapping birds 

 into the water with their quants, quieting them with a smart 

 blow of the yew-fir pole given smartly across the skull. 

 But even then they will follow his shadow, hissing, and 

 making great pretence of attack, for they are veritable 

 swashbucklers. Indeed, their fights seem to be settled, as 

 a rule, on sight, the younger birds fleeing before the elder, 

 who merely drive them away if they invade their station 

 or broad. 



But none but a fenman would rob a swan's nest, for a 

 nastier morsel than a swan's egg I never tasted a most 

 nauseous thing. After each egg is laid, you may see them 

 " ringing the bell," and going round and round each other 

 in circles, now widening, now contracting, their necks half 

 bent, till they begin lining, with feathers all fluffy. I have 

 seen them court thus strangely for over an hour, and when 

 their love was consummated, they became all at once like 

 white india-rubber birds, and began bathing, shaking their 

 tails, and tossing the warm water over their glistening 

 feathers, and drinking from the surface of the mere. After 

 all the eggs are laid they begin sitting by turn, and in a 

 month the young cygnets are hatched and taken to the 

 water, leaving their piled-up cradle naked to the skies. 



At such seasons you may hear the snorting calls of the 

 old birds, and the replies of the cygnets as they feed upon 

 the shallows over the hard bottom, for the swan dearly 



