WILD LIFE IN SEVERN ESTUARY 21 



reaches the sound of whisthng wings, and a flight 

 of wild ducks, all males — for the females are occu- 

 pied elsewhere — passes in the middle distance, the 

 beautiful plumage of the birds with the white 

 neck-circles showing plainly in the sunshine. And 

 from far overhead, from above the crying plovers, 

 falls the song of the invisible sky-lark — Shelley's 

 " blithe spirit " — dropping its cascade of notes 

 from the blue heaven. Another song comes from 

 a second bird in a different quarter of the sky. 

 And yet another from a third, the notes mellowed 

 almost to stillness in the distance. 



As the sounds of the landscape mingle with the 

 faint but aU-pervading and indescribable odour of 

 growing herbage and young leaves, and the scent 

 of the early hawthorn and the late cowslips, one 

 feels on the brink of one of the secrets which primi- 

 tive man probably shared with wild nature, the 

 secret which is still presented to us in the unfath- 

 omed mystery of the migration of birds and wild 

 creatiures. For these elusive scents and sounds 

 hold one by the throat and bring up to the surface 

 of consciousness by association a hidden world 

 of the most powerful emotions. A native of this 

 land, a man of education and culture, landing at a 

 neighbouring port after many years' absence and 

 going at once into the country on such a morning 

 as this amidst the growing herbage and flowers was 

 found rolling himself on the ground in the smell of 

 his native fields like a wild animal. One realizes 

 thus how the call of the wilderness or the desert 

 reaches men pent in cities in something on the 

 spring air, or on the autumn wind, and overmasters 

 them and commands them. And so doubtless it is 



