286 The Face of the Wilderness 



scape as the birds that feed along the shore. For 

 the farms are older than the fences, and were 

 built by the brink of the ancient marsh in days when 

 it was seldom dry. Here and there, perhaps, an 

 outlying farm or hamlet is surrounded by the 

 waters, but raised above them on so slight an 

 acclivity that until the flood came the whole spot 

 had seemed on one dead level. Even in the 

 greatest floods of a modern lifetime, there are 

 comparatively few of the older cottages and farm- 

 houses in parishes bordering our smaller streams 

 and rivers that are ever invaded by the water. 

 The old houses stand dryshod by the shore, though, 

 scarcely a hundred yards away, the redbrick walls 

 of the erections of recent builders mount guard 

 above their washed-out cabbage-beds. A difference 

 of eighteen inches in the elevation between one 

 end of a modern road and the other is not likely 

 to attract the attention of any uninstructed eye, 

 until the day comes when the waters re-enter their 

 own. 



Readily as birds of certain kinds haunt the margin 

 of the rising and falling flood water, they assemble 

 in far greater numbers and variety when the wild 

 aspect of the flooded marshes is fixed and intensified 

 by frost. After a few days of hard weather great 

 flocks of wild-fowl and many smaller birds begin to 

 rove southwards and westwards over a vast area 

 of Northern Europe ; and among these myriads 

 of birds in hungry stir, enormous numbers seek 

 England for a temporary refuge, while many of 

 our own birds, in like manner, drift southwards 



