THE RUFF AND REEVE IN LINCOLNSHIRE. 207 



comrade in many a shooting adventure. He was the type of a 

 class, common enough at the commencement of the century, 

 but now, like the birds they followed, fast disappearing from 

 amongst us. He made bricks in summer, and in winter earned 

 a decent competence by coast shooting. Often when waiting to 

 " stand flight" have I passed an hour in his cottage close to the 

 coast, listening to 



" Such tales as old men tell, 

 When age has frosted, and when toil has numbed them." 



Making every allowance for the lapse of time and an old man's 

 memory, those must have been glorious days for the coast 

 shooter ; black masses of duck — Mallard, Wigeon, and Pochard 

 — acres in extent on the river ; on the muds, Knot, Grey Plover, 

 Kedshank, and Godwit innumerable, so that he could go down 

 in the early dawn to low-water mark, and in a few hours shoot 

 sufficient " almost to load a donkey." Then in the latter spring 

 came Dotterel, "Boughs and Bees," Whimbrel, and late Golden 

 Plover with black breasts, into the grass-marshes and coast 

 "fitties," in numbers which to us in these days appear almost 

 incredible. By long habit in trying to circumvent shy creatures, 

 he had contracted always a stooping gait, with his head thrust 

 forward, his keen grey eyes ever ready to take in the smallest 

 sign of bird-life, and he invariably carried his right hand partly 

 closed, as if grasping his favourite fowling-piece. In later years 

 his heavy duck-guns got too much for him ; but he carried a 

 handy, far-reaching double, with " Stubbs-twist " barrels to the 

 last. For so it came about one winter night, after a day on the 

 coast, reclining by his own fireside, within hearing of the calls 

 of the shore-birds, when outside the chill air was filled with 

 soft, silent, slow-descending snowflakes — 



11 Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field 

 Approaching thro' the darkness, call'd," 



and all that was best in the time-worn frame went out alone 

 into the night. 



Messrs. Clarke and Boebuck, in their excellent ' Handbook of 

 Yorkshire Vertebrata,' remark : — " Until about the commence- 

 ment of the present century this species was abundant, and bred 

 in the carrs of East Yorkshire, on Skip with Common, near 

 Selby, and also on Hatfield Chase, and the carrs about Doncaster, 



