60 ANIMAL ARTISANS 



found the nests washed away, and ducks', teals', and 

 swans' eggs floating all over the river. 



When the rivers begin to flood in earnest, the scene 

 of the deluge, if the district is an English one, is 

 usually the flat meadows or marshes, and the animal 

 victims are of all kinds and sizes, from field-mice to 

 sheep and oxen, according to the depth of the waters 

 and the nature of the ground. 



Cattle are more often drowned in the marsh 

 floods caused by exceptionally high tides flowing up 

 estuaries, and so breaking embankments, than by 

 ordinary river floods. They seem singularly help- 

 less and frightened in such circumstances. It is 

 almost impossible to drive them through the rising 

 waters, even though it is quite safe for a mounted 

 man to follow them. They huddle together on any 

 piece of dry ground left, and are almost as loath to 

 quit it as horses are to leave a burning stable. They 

 lose any sense they have, even if they are induced to 

 move. We have seen a whole herd of young bullocks, 

 which were being driven off some dangerously flooded 

 marshes when the tide was rising fast, walk not 

 through the gateway, where there was a bridge over 

 the dyke, though the water covered it, but straight 

 into the deep drain above it, where several were 

 drowned. It did not seem to occur to them to feel 

 the depth with their feet, or to try whether there was 

 firm ground or seven feet of water in front of them. 



Marsh floods annually claim a great number of 

 victims among sheep. In some of the Norfolk " meal 

 marshes," which in summer are famous grazing ground 



