Tenants of a Season. 55 
lays eight eggs, and frequently rears a second brood in the season. 
If all the young survived, there would be at the end of ten 
years no fewer than two thousand millions of descendants to a 
single pair. What ghastly tables of mortality the annals of the 
race would furnish! The ivy-crowned ruins of the long dis- 
mantled mill whose memory goes back to the days of the old 
Norman survey is the haunt of many a shy-feathered builder. In 
their favourite nook, draped with dark trailing moss, glittering 
with drops from water that still plashes down where it fell a thou- 
sand years ago, a pair of dainty wagtails make their nest year 
after year safe from all invasion, unless perchance the visit of 
an unprincipled cuckoo. 
Niches in the ancient walls are tenanted by the robin and the 
oxeye ; among the sheltering ivy the chaffinch weaves her nest. 
High up inthe great sycamore that spreads its broad arms over 
the ruin a crow has built himself a fortress destined ere long to be 
harried by some angry farmer, and the thief himself, slain perhaps 
red-handed, hung up as a warning to his fellows. Along the 
wandering banks beyond, overshadowed in summer by a cool 
canopy of marestail and meadow-sweet, there lingers yet a relic, it 
may be, of far-off feudal days. Far among the tangle of the winter 
thickets, peering shyly out here and there between the glossy hasel 
stems, wild snowdrops, wild since Norman times, hang their 
graceful heads, far more lovely the naturalist fondly thinks than 
their statelier sisters of the garden. Now the meeting streams 
widen out into the river. Dark alders and grey willow trees lean 
over the water. Broad belis of sedge and rushes line the shore, 
set here and there with fiery clusters of marsh-marigold. Here in 
winter the snipe get up, with strange cry and devious flight ; and 
the water-rail steals silently away under the bank, or, as she flies 
to cover, leaves a silvery path with her trailing feet. Here, too, in 
springtime, the shy moor-hen cautiously anchors her broad nest of 
flags out in mid-stream among brown stems of rustling reeds. 
Later on she will lead out her dusky brood on these tranquil 
waters. He isa happy man who catches sight of the little crew 
as they make their first plunge into the world. A single day old 
perhaps, they do not hesitate at the approach of danger to 
scramble over the edge of the nest and swim boldly after their 
anxious mother to safer shelter on the opposite shore. Little balls 
of black down, with a touch of vermilion fora beak, they venture 
fearlessly on their first cruise, diving under obstructing logs or 
steering carefully through a fleet of lily leaves with the coolness of 
a practised hand. Sometimesa low-hanging branch will shipwreck 
unawares a little argonaut and turn him on his back, kicking his 
long yellow feet helplessly in the air until righted by a dexterous 
touch from the parent’s bill. 
