WILD LIFE IN SEVERN ESTUARY 9 



tyranny of things that are strong ; with here and 

 there a grimmer relic of the deep speaking of some 

 unrecorded tragedy of the sea. But everywhere 

 corks, corks, corks. Thousands and millions of 

 them. Most of them worn and fretted by the waves. 

 Some new and familiar ; some with the marks of 

 the lordly vintages of France still stamped upon, 

 them ; some evidently cast away in distant latitudes 

 and longitudes, bearing strange devices and legends 

 in unknown tongues ; but all borne here by the sea. 

 There have been ages of stone, and of metal, and of 

 the potter's art. But few of us realize that we are 

 ourselves living in the most characteristic age of 

 all — the Great Bottle Age ; the age when universal 

 man drank things out of bottles and strewed the 

 earth with the shards thereof and the ocean itself 

 with the corks. 



And here in the pebbles amid all these disjected 

 sweepings of the world and just above high-water 

 mark, the little ring-dotterel still places her nest, 

 even as she did before man moved on the waters or 

 troubled the earth by going up and down in it. 

 Only a slight depression is scooped in the grey 

 pebbles and coarse sand. The grey-yellow and 

 spotted eggs, which are four in number, lie with their 

 small ends together. They look like emblems of a 

 peace enfolding all things as they lie here in the 

 warm sun. Yet do they too bear the marks of the 

 world-old stress upon them. For they are so pro- 

 tectively coloured to their surroundings that they 

 are almost invisible at a short distance. Thus do 

 the ages of stress overlap each other and ever with 

 the same meaning in them. 



The lapwings are tumbling and crying over the 



