THE FLATS 47 



know within a few yards where they are safe on the 

 salt marshes (on the Earl of Leicester's estate) and 

 where not ; that they will pay no attention to a man 

 with a walking-stick, but that the sentinels instantly 

 warn the flock of the approach of the gunner at almost 

 any distance away; and that on Sundays when no 

 shooting is allowed in certain localities they will uncon- 

 cernedly walk about with — my own interpolation — 

 derisive confidence in their immunity. According to 

 Darwin, in the Voyage of the Beagle, the Fuegians could 

 not be taught to connect the detonation of a gun with 

 the death of an animal at a distance from it. It is well 

 for the survival of the wild geese that they have learned 

 the ABC of such association ! Even the domestic 

 geese (descended from the grey lag) retain something of 

 their old lofty bearing and independence, and are far and 

 away the most original and sagacious of homestead fowls. 



Norfolk is indeed a monstrous fine country for birds, 

 and the seeker has fulfilment of his quest thrust upon 

 him. Does he tire of the mobs of pheasants in the woods, 

 does the exclusive society of the flats keep him at too 

 uncomfortable a distance — almost every house is a varied 

 peep-show. I remember spending the night in the room 

 of a beautiful old seventeenth-century house (with fine 

 gables, clustered chimneys of brickwork in the Hampton 

 Court manner, and a red-tiled roof with shingled pro- 

 jections) in one of the coast villages. Here I had a 

 close view and a long view — ^indeed, the privilege was 

 compulsory — of two jays, two dotterel, two corncrakes, 

 a long-eared owl, a stone-curlew, a waxwing, a budgaree 

 and a squirrel. The naturalist had but to sit in a chair 

 and gaze on the birds performing characteristic actions 

 in their glass hives like petrified acrobats. Why ever 

 tear a thorny way through brake, through briar ? Why 

 spend ten guineas on a field-glass ? Why invite lumbago 

 in a bog ? Why trouble to read Shelley in the original 

 when there is Matthew Arnold's criticism ? 



The sitting-room I had included other ohjets d'art 

 besides the birds, and the collector had mobilized such 



