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"Bad boys; bad, thoughtless, wicked boys!" grunted Father Swythe; but he lay perfectly still with arms and legs spread apart as far as they would go. "Why don't you stand up and walk out?" cried Fred, at last, taking compassion on his tutor's awkward plight. "Because I'm so heavy, boy: I should sink." "Oh, no. It isn't deep there. I've often waded about there to look for moorhens' nests."
To these on the soft oozy mud succeed acres of sedge and rush and great turfs of greyish grass. Low willows are scattered about, and alder at the edge and where the ground is firmer. This is the home of the dragon-flies, of the coots, whose white bald foreheads distinguish them at a distance, and of the moorhens.
You must push through the reed grass to find the sword-flags; the stout willow-herbs will not be trampled down, but resist the foot like underwood. Pink lychnis flowers behind the withy stoles, and little black moorhens swim away, as you gather it, after their mother, who has dived under the water-grass, and broken the smooth surface of the duckweed.
The hedgehog knew little of the pulsing life of mid-day, but at dusk she sometimes found a tired fly, or bee, or beetle, hiding in the matted grass beneath the gorse, and so was made aware of summer's near approach. Among the flags and the rushes of the pond, a pair of fussy moorhens built their nest on an islet of decayed vegetation clustered round a stone.
They love water-rats and moorhens more than any other food. A strange prejudice exists among hunting men against cleaning out artificial earths. There was never a greater fallacy. Fox-earths want looking to from time to time, say every ten years, for rabbits will render them practically useless by burrowing out in different places.
As if in revenge for the interference, they have so ransacked the marsh every spring for the eggs of the waterfowl that the wild duck will not lay there, but seek spots safer from such enemies. The marsh is left to the coots and moorhens that from thence stock the brooks.
The calls of moorhens came up from a lake in a deep valley near, beeches grow down the steep slope to the edge of the water, and the wind which rippled it drew in a strong draught up the hill. From that height the glance saw to the bottom of the clear water, to which the waves and the wind gave a translucent green.
Yet the stream ran clear and sweet, and deep in places. It was too broad for leaping over. Down the current sedges grew thickly at a curve: up the stream the young flags were rising; it had an inhabited look, if such a term may be used, and moorhens and water-rats were about but no fish. A wide furrow came along the meadow and joined the stream from the side.
He came upon two moorhens, fighting as if to the death, but he was the death; and slew one of them from behind neatly, and had to go back with it, past both bellowings, to a second burrow in the sea-bank, where he put it; and later he came upon only seven great, mangy, old, stump-tailed, scarred, horrible ghouls of shore rats, all mobbing a wounded seagull a herring-gull with a broken wing.
About 2.30 o'clock on a May morning a rook begins the grand concert with a solo in G flat; then a cock pheasant crows, or an owl hoots; moorhens begin to stir, and gradually the woodland orchestra works up to a tremendous burst of song, such as is never heard at any hour but that of sunrise. "Now the rich stream of music winds along, Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, Through verdant vales."
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