30 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



little ones are streaming out of the sedge to her. 

 She is chattering with emotion, every feather 

 quivering with excitement. The hold of the Great 

 Terror of Man is upon her. In a few days, nay, in a 

 few hours, she will have taught it to them and they 

 will have passed irrevocably into another world. 

 And yet you saw the little ducks. They knew no- 

 thing of it. 



Oh, you wise men who would reconstruct the 

 world. Give us the young. Give us the young. 

 Do what you like with the world, only give us the 

 young. It is the dreams which they dream, the 

 Utopias which they conceive, the thoughts which 

 they think, which will build the world. Give us 

 the young before the evil past has claimed them, and 

 we will create a new heaven and a new earth. 



The afternoon shadows fall with lengthening 

 lines on the black ground as we advance up the 

 vaUey. Here the peat cutters have been at work, 

 and the deep brown-black of the bare surface 

 absorbs the light and gives a sombre effect to the 

 landscape. The lines of freshly cut peat stretch 

 away to the distance with water gleaming between 

 them. The latest cut blocks look like huge slabs 

 of moist black cheese, and are laid nearly flat. 

 The dry ones, shrunken to a third of the size, are 

 piled in heaps which in the last stage of all are in 

 size and shape almost like hayricks. Where the 

 ground rises and the long ferns grow beneath the 

 trees a bird the size of a small dove, mottled brown 

 on the back, but marked like an owl or cuckoo on 

 the under plumage, lies dead on the ground. It is 

 a nightjar, one of the last summer migrants to arrive, 

 and the neck is torn where it has struck in flight 



