THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
the new-comers approach, exhilarates, but certainly defies all verbal 
effort to describe— a riot of varied intonations, gabblings, and shrill - 
jarring discords. As the incomers lower their flight, the whole seascape 
ahead— grey waters with dimly seen dunes and distant hills beyond — 
seems streaked and serried with infinite longitudinal stripes, all cleaving, 
wing to wing, in rigid precision to windward. Each unit being dark forward 
and snow-white aft, the effect of their lower lines, as seen against the sea, 
is as of a hundred huge centipedes crawling along ! 
When large bodies of wild-geese come in, as I have endeavoured to 
describe— that is, vast aggregations of geese composed of many separate 
parties— they sometimes, upon reaching their selected alighting place, 
develop an exhibition of ordered aerial evolutions as complex as — and 
even more perfectly executed than our most elaborate human 
manoeuvres. Few scenes within my experience of wild bird -life are more 
amazing or more impressive than this ; though perhaps the flashing 
quick-change evolutions of teal, or of a cloud of whirling dunlings,are not 
less marvellous. The latter is an everyday spectacle on our wilder coasts ; 
yet never is eye able to follow its lightning rapidity, nor can we under- 
stand how a complete reversal of massed formations moving at express 
speed can be executed twenty times in a minute with never a mischance 
or a collision. 
With the geese the case is not quite analogous, nor the velocity so 
great. Here each distinct flock — all clearly under individual command 
—takes up its own position, every unit obeying with mechanical precision 
as the infinite divisions wheel and counter wheel, some to right, others 
to left, in a perplexing confusion of eddying, eccentric and opposing 
circles, ellipses and parabolas, till eye can no longer follow the mazy 
movement. Yet never an accident or mischance occurs in all these revolv- 
ing circulating hosts ; never does one detect a false move, or suddenly 
shifted helm — all is executed with a regularity and a perfect precision 
beyond the power of human calculation. Then, amidst a crash of re- 
verberating voices, the sea flies up white over a couple of acres — they’re 
down ! 
Needless to say, the full effect of such scenes can only be realized when 
the spectator is fairly near, or almost underneath them — a position that 
is, in practice, almost impossible to attain — but which I once had the luck 
to enjoy to perfection. We lay, awaiting the flood -tide in a creek, concealed 
(by mere chance) behind one of the rare abrupt ridges to be met with in 
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