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Again, for three days, the Norman coast has been thrashed by squalls of driving snow. The wild geese are honking in V-shaped lines to an inland refuge for the white sea is no longer tenable. Curlews cry hoarsely over the frozen fields.
In these moods, this contemporary of Dryden and Congreve gives us such accurate transcripts of country life as the following: When the loos'd horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, Whose stealing face and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear; When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud: When curlews cry beneath the village-walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls.
Besides these, the lakes boast all the usual kinds of water-fowl, as herons, ducks, snipe, teal, etc.; the gardens and groves abound with blackbirds, thrushes, and nightingales; curlews and peewits are seen occasionally; while pigeons, starlings, crows, magpies, larks, sparrows, and swallows are common.
Curlews piped dolorously the very psalm of solitude, and when he passed among the hazel-woods of Strone and Achnatra, their dark recesses belled continually with owls.
From these same lovers of nature I gathered that for the first time in their recollection sea-gulls and curlews had likewise been seen on the banks of the Marne. While the country now abounds in newcomers, many of the old familiar birds and animals are rapidly disappearing.
The early morning that particular April day had been lovely; curlews newly returned had luted their love-song overhead; golden plovers had piped upon the bents; there was a scent of heather-burning in the snell air, but suddenly the weather had changed, and with an idle motion snowflakes now drifted down the wind.
Father and son would wade into the ocean that was pink and lavender in the sunset. Above them, the white curlews swooped and curved and opened their pine wood beaks to squawk a prayer for dead fish. But the workers did not stop to watch. Their food also was in question. They must pluck the black seaweed to fertilize their field.
It was shining blue weather, with a constantly changing prospect of brown hills and far green meadows, and a continual sound of larks and curlews and falling streams. But I had no mind for the summer, and little for Hislop's conversation, for as the fateful fifteenth of June drew near I was overweighed with the hopeless difficulties of my enterprise.
Dot had never been in the town, but she was certain she had never heard anything like the Curlew's wailing in her home; and she wondered what Willy Wagtail meant, but she was too sleepy to ask; so she nestled a little closer to the Kangaroo, and with the shrieking of the Curlews, and the mournful note of the distant mo-poke in her ears, she fell asleep again.
Lying in the heather, hearing nothing but the liquid whinny of the curlews that had lately forsaken the tidal waters for the mountains, she would watch the foam that fringed the islands, unconscious of the sea's sound and tumult, half expecting that a miracle would happen and that someday she would see the three-funnelled Pennant steaming over the white sea into Galway Bay.
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