292 The Face of the Wilderness 



seen water- rail. Each spring the strange clamour 

 of " brook- runner," as it is sometimes called by 

 countrymen who are still familiar with it, can be 

 heard from the depths of the sedge. On the wet 

 and stubbly ooze, in the twilight of the new-grown 

 reed-beds, the rough nest is heaped together out of 

 pallid reed-blades of the previous year. The eggs 

 with their pale buff ground and spots of faded purple 

 are a puny copy of the corncrake's. Only very 

 rarely is a glimpse to be caught of the slim shape, 

 darker than the corncrake's, which is the familiar 

 spirit of the fen. The natural secretiveness of the 

 water-rail is to some extent its protection; for it 

 is the birds which nature has never taught either 

 to hide from man or to adapt their ways to his 

 which from age to age fight the losing battle of 

 extinction. 



Agriculture has waged almost equal warfare on 

 the plants of the heath and of the marsh. But the 

 draining of a morass makes, as a rule, a more sweep- 

 ing change in plant life than the gradual reclama- 

 tion of a heath or hill ; and the broom and heather 

 and juniper have vanished less completely from 

 many tracts where they once prevailed than the 

 marsh plants from their former home. Yet there 

 are many upland districts where even the common 

 ling by far the most generally distributed of the 

 various species of heather is to-day an unknown 

 plant over long stretches of country ; and one may 

 travel for almost as many miles on a midsummer 

 day without catching the glint of the flowering 



