28 BIRD LIFE ON ISLAND AND SHORE 
become impressed. Her alterations of it were no 
mere careless touches: it was picked up and 
shifted bodily across the nest; it was interwoven 
with the eggs; it was poked about on the sand 
in cabalistic posturings; it was manipulated in 
occult tracings. Often for moments together she 
would stand upright on her long legs, motionless, 
rejoicing over the subtlety of some master-stroke, 
She can have envied no other Stilt its nest, its 
mate, or the spotting of its eggs. With them and 
the straw, combinations were possible—after alll, 
Shakespeare’s works are built out of twenty-five 
letters—that could never during one period of 
incubation weary or pall. To watch her was to 
wonder if indeed she was not by some strange 
inversion or warp of instinct really brooding on 
the straw, and using the eggs as mere letter- 
weights to safeguard it from the gusts that issued 
from the rocky gorge. On no single occasion, at 
any rate whilst there yet remained eggs in the 
nest, did she fail on return to weigh it down, to 
readjust it to her fancy. Like Mr Pecksnifi’s 
insistence after the banquet at Mrs Todgers on a 
little drop to drink, it seemed a mania. 
As had been anticipated, three or four days 
after the erection of the screen two of the eggs 
hatched. There lay one morning some yards 
distant from her nest a couple of tiny chicks 
still as death, and stretched out flat like the grey 
