THE LAST FORAY. 
ayow is very pretty in pictures, and beauti- 
ful to write about—in a warm study ; but 
the real thing has its limits. And the scene 
was one of the limits—a flat, wind-bitten 
coast-line in northern Europe, a shallow, cold 
sea, fretted by an interminable wind that 
had kissed the Arctic ice and the everlasting 
driving snow. 
There was also sky—but you couldn’t see it 
—like the leaden wrapping of a pound of tea. 
It was a time of great flitting on the wings 
of the wind and the snow. 
All day the birds had been passing south— 
now a wedge of duck ‘hugging’ the waves; 
now a V of great swinging wild geese; now a 
majestic white escort of huge wild swans ; now 
a dozen or two skylarks, buoyant and almost 
as fragile as the snowflakes; and, again, a 
‘trip’ of white buntings, gay as children, and 
scarcely distinguishable from the wild flakes. 
Some there were who stopped, exhausted, 
to rest; a few who fell—for ever—by the 
way ; and some, like the Norsemen of old, who 
landed there because their business was rapine. 
And all the time the land beasts, the wingless 
ones, prowled hungrily to and fro, or crouched, 
