O'er Fell and Dale 



can swallow. On one occasion I tickled a pounder from 

 beneath the dark recesses of an overhanging bank, and 

 discovered that he had just sucked down an innocent 

 little water shrew as he swam across a pool no wider 

 than the surface of an ordinary-sized dining-table. 



Just below this trout pool and before we come to 

 what I christened " bird flat," the left bank of the river 

 rises at an angle approximating that of a church steeple. 

 On this escarpment a sandpiper had made her nest 

 under a tangle of dead bracken. She was at once the 

 boldest and noisiest member of her species I had ever 

 come near, and I coveted her portrait, but the abrupt 

 steepness of the bank forbade photography of any 

 kind, except looking down from the top, or up from the 

 boulder-strewn bed of the river below, points equally 

 impossible on account of their distance from the nest. 



There's a way out of most difficulties, however, as 

 the mouse said when the cat lifted him out of the liquor 

 vat, so I borrowed a pick and spade from a neighbour- 

 ing farmer and dug myself in half-way up the bank and 

 on a level with the nest. 



No sooner had I fixed up my apparatus and been 

 covered with the green tent-cloth by my assistant than 

 I heard the sandpiper declaiming in her soft plaintive 

 notes from the bed of the stream below. Peeping 

 through a small hole I espied her hopping from stone to 

 stone calling all the time and working her tail up and 

 down after the manner of her kind. I concluded her 

 mate was close by and that she was calling to him. Not 

 a bit of it, she was talking to herself. She flew from a 



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