304 THE BITTERN 



time it was very scarce in some seasons, yet he records 

 the fact that in the winter of 1830 to 1831 ten bitterns 

 were exposed for sale on one morning in Bath, and sixty 

 were taken the same season in Yorkshire. " Butter- 

 bumps " was the popular name for the noisy bird, 

 which, as some said, bellowed like a bull. The late 

 Lord Lilford wrote that he knew a lady who said that 

 when she was first married, about the year 1845, and 

 went to live in East Norfolk, she was constantly kept 

 awake by the Bittern's booming in the neighbouring 

 marshes. Tennyson's farmer called it the bogle. 



Some of us were not sorry to hear that one of these 

 rare visitors had been able to have its revenge on one of 

 its persecutors lately. Being wounded only, it turned 

 on the dog of " the man with the gun," who could riot 

 resist shooting a stranger, and used its strong bill and 

 claws to good purpose. Its haunts are reed-beds, and 

 the nest is composed of dried flags and reeds. Its 

 flesh is said to taste and look like that of the leveret, 

 with a slight flavour of wild-fowl, and to be more bitter 

 eating than that of the young Heron. In the North 

 Kent marshes Bitterns were called " Yaller French 

 Herns," and the fen dwellers could get half a guinea 

 for each bird. In France, of a coarse and stupid man, 

 they often say, " C'est un vrai butor (Bittern);" Moliere 

 says, " Peste soit du gras butor;" and Georges Sand 

 wrote, " If your provincial bourgeois heard that, they 

 would take our daughters for ' des butordes,'* such as 

 their own are." Voltaire speaks again of "lesbutorderies 

 de cet univers." In Saxony again the peasants say of 

 a noisy brawler, "He booms like a Bittern." 



'That a pair of Bitterns which had been observed 

 for some little time on an estate near Hertford should 



* Noisy, coarse creatures. 



