SOUTHWARD HO! 
De by the marshes a biggish brown 
bird, not unlike a hawk, is seated on 
some old and tottering rails. The sun at 
midday is still almost intolerably hot, and 
the bird’s odd, wooden cry beats through the 
heat-haze with strange persistency. 
_ He is a young cuckoo, who yesterday, or 
the day before, or last week, left, somewhere 
far inland, his poor, confiding little foster- 
parents, and began to work his way south- 
wards. 
This is probably the last dry land he will 
touch before reaching France, and that meal 
of caterpillars—of the drinker-moth probably 
—which he has now flown down to the grass 
at the foot of the rails to find, is the last food 
his crop may know for many a long and weary 
mile. 
Over the coarse, marsh-land grass, in and 
out among the feathery tamarisks, a swallow 
darts and circles silently. Once it passes so 
close that we think we could nearly have 
knocked it over with a stick, and can plainly 
notice the patch of dull rust on its breast. 
Another swallow appears in a second or two 
from nowhere, to be followed by a third, and 
