THE FLATS 45 



thriving trade route, where merchants, sight-seers, specu- 

 lators, adventurers and natives mingle in a common 

 throng. One's eye; will turn to the linnets bounding 

 through space with fairy chimes, intoxicated by the 

 pure sharp air, and sometimes one bird pursuing 

 another in a playful ecstasy of love. From them, it 

 will perch idly on a patch of thistles and not perceive 

 at first that the little balls of down travelling upwards, 

 as if starting a handicap race, are set going by a First 

 Cause, a Primum Mobile — a pair of goldfinches swaying, 

 fluttering, " waving their wings in gold," as Horace Walpole 

 (a true lover of animals) says, on the thistle heads. 



Once, not thirty yards from Blakeney Quay, I caught 

 sight of a male siskin perched on the bank of a small 

 creek among the herbage. There could be no mistake, 

 for the sun shone full upon his greys and greens and the 

 black and gold wings ^ (exquisite together both in nature 

 and in art), and I was but twenty-five paces away. But 

 what did a solitary siskin on a stream's bank in this 

 treeless wilderness, swept by the bitter east wind ? Some 

 hardy and adventurous navigator, planting the siskin 

 flag on a new continent, or a tired traveller, separated 

 from his kin, a castaway dumped upon this sea of brown 

 slime and marsh by the rough wind ? It is curious 

 how single visitations like this impress themselves upon 

 the mind. On the banks of the Suffolk Aide I remember 

 once seeing a single dabchick in the river, a single 

 goldfinch feeding on a thistle head, a kingfisher rushing 

 down a muddy creek (a pearl in an oyster), all within 

 a couple of minutes, and then a few minutes later a 

 solitary young red-backed shrike perched on a bush 

 two yards away (it was the 7th of October, and its parents 

 should have settled down in Abyssinia many days 

 before). Whether it was the strangeness of this last 

 sight or the contrast afforded by a flock of widgeon 

 passing me in full whistle soon after,^ this experience — 



^ The winter colouring is olivaceous. 



' It is a liquid call, and not unlike both the low and fluting 

 call of the sheld-drakes to their mates in the breeding season and 

 the cry of the stone-curlew on the way to their feeding-grounds 

 in the dusk. 



