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"Amen," answered the steward, gravely; "I wish the poor deserted lad no ill." "And he is gone like a wild-duck, as he came," continued Mrs. Lilias; "no lowering of drawbridges, or pacing along causeways, for him. I wonder who is to clean his trumpery out after him though the things are worth lifting, too."
The water-hen are so numerous that at Nuneham Lock they run into the cottages, and at other locks the men complain they eat all their winter cabbages. As many as forty at a time have been counted on the meadows. Mr. Harcourt has also established a wild-duck colony on and about the island at Nuneham. The island has a pond in the centre, with sedges and ancient willows and tall trees round.
A flock of curlew were passing, wailing one to the other, across the sunset; a string of late gulls trailed athwart the sky; and a wedge of those beautiful little wild-duck known as wigeon was letting itself down to the shores of the inlet.
Sheila was doing her best to entertain the stranger, and he, in a dream of his own, was listening to the information she gave him. How much of it did he carry away? He was told that the gray goose built its nest in the rushes at the edge of lakes: Sheila knew several nests in Borva. Sheila also caught the young of the wild-duck when the mother was guiding them down the hill-rivulets to the sea.
"Oh, you must not think it is anything so serious as that. You will soon pick up from the ladies you will meet some notion of how you differ from them; and if you should startle or puzzle them a little at first by talking about the chances of the fishing or the catching of wild-duck, or the way to reclaim bogland, you will soon get over all that."
Several ponds of water are found during winter in this neighbourhood, which are frequented by numerous flights of wild-duck, affording capital game for the hungry sportsman. Date-palms are now in blossom, whose flowers are all at first encased in a pod.
There were the ashes on the stone hearth, just as it had been left years back by the old trapper; some rough-hewn shelves, a rude bedstead of cedar poles still occupied a corner of the little dwelling; heaps of old dry moss and grass lay upon the ground; and the little squaw pointed with one of her silent laughs to a collection of broken egg-shells, where some wild-duck had sat and hatched her downy brood among the soft materials which she had found and appropriated to her own purpose.
Nevertheless, these games horse-racing, sham fights, and ostrich- hunting, and the like gave me no abiding satisfaction; they were no sooner over than I would go back, almost with a sense of relief, to my solitary rambles and bird-watching, and to wishing that the day would come when my masterful brother would allow me to use a gun and practise the one sport of wild-duck shooting I desired.
Otter, pike, perch, heron, kingfisher, owl, moorhen, coot, grebe, diver, wild-duck, swan, teal, dipper, land-rat, and water-rat altogether sixteen creatures are killed in order that one may flourish. Although none of these, even in the south of England except the otter has yet been excluded, the majority of them are so thinned down as to be rarely seen unless carefully sought.
In animals it has a more marked effect; for instance, I find in the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in the wild-duck; and I presume that this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less, and walking more, than its wild parent.
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