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Then the life sank out of his brain, and he hung limply; and the broad wings bore him inland over the dyke-top straight over the warm and hidden nest where he had longed to be. The Rivals of Ringwaak A white flood, still and wonderful, the moonlight lay on the naked rampikes and dense thickets of Ringwaak Hill.
The sheep have been driven off the land below; the cattle stand ranged shivering on high dykes inland; they will be saved in punts, if the worst befall. But a hundred spades, wielded by practised hands, cannot stop that tiny rat-hole. The trickle becomes a rush the rush a roaring waterfall. The dyke-top trembles- -gives.
Nearer and nearer across the waste drew the movement that marked the incoming flood. Then from over the dyke-top floated a noiseless, winnowing, sinister shape which seemed the very embodiment of the desolation. The great white owl of the north, driven down from his Arctic hunting-grounds by hunger, came questing over the ragged levels.
No one has ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper which there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal thread which is trickling over the dyke or worse, through some forgotten rat's hole in its side hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute powers of nature, not for their employer's sake alone, but for the sake of their own year's labour and their own year's bread.
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