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Updated: September 13, 2025
Let me see the very thistles opening their great crowns I should miss the thistles; the reed-grasses hiding the moorhen; the bryony bine, at first crudely ambitious and lifted by force of youthful sap straight above the hedgerow to sink of its own weight presently and progress with crafty tendrils; swifts shot through the air with outstretched wings like crescent-headed shaftless arrows darted from the clouds; the chaffinch with a feather in her bill; all the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of the summer let me watch the same succession year by year.
'Are beds so scarce, then, that ye must hamper the high road of the king with your bodies? Now, by St. Ursula of Alpuxerra, there be those who might think that birds who fly o' nights were after higher game than the moorhen or the woodcock!
A moorhen ventures forth from under the arches, her favourite hiding-place, and feeds among the weeds by the shore, but at the least movement rushes back to shelter. A wood-pigeon comes over, flying slowly; he was going to alight on the ash tree yonder, but suddenly espying some one under the cover of the boughs increases his pace and rises higher.
A starved pigeon fallen from the pine-boughs; an occasional moorhen weak and almost defenceless; a wild duck that Lutra had captured by darting from beneath a root while the indiscreet bird was feeding, head downwards, at the river's brink these were among the varied items of the hungry otters' food. Life was indeed hard to maintain.
"That was clover, that warm whiff on the breeze," he remarked; "and those are cows we hear cropping the grass behind us and blowing softly between mouthfuls. There is a sound of distant reapers, and yonder rises a blue line of cottage smoke against the woodland. The river runs somewhere close by, for I hear the call of a moorhen, and I see by your build that you're a freshwater mariner.
Yegor sat by my side. I want to say a few words about him. He was considered the cleverest sportsman in the whole district. Every step of the ground for fifty miles round he had been over again and again. He seldom fired at a bird, for lack of powder and shot; but it was enough for him to decoy a moorhen or to detect the track of a grouse.
When I finally left this curious company noisy boys, great yellow feather-footed fowls, dainty moorhen and vociferous jays it was late, but another amusing experience was in store for me. Leaving the village I went up the hill to the Devil's Jumps to see the sun set.
Under the bushes in the distant nook the moorhen, reassured by the silence, came out from the grey-green grass and the rushes. Surely Calypso's cave could not be far distant, where she with work and song the time divides, And through, the loom the golden shuttle guides. For the Immortals are hiding somewhere still in the woods; even now I do not weary searching for them.
"It's the anniversary of the day on which I first met Trivett, and I've made a moorhen and rabbit-pie to celebrate it," declared Mrs Trivett. Mavis was a little surprised at this piece of information, but she very soon learned that Mrs Trivett's life was chiefly occupied with the recollection and celebration of anniversaries of any and every event which had occurred in her life.
At this season the crows are always in the mowing-grass, searching about, stalking in winding tracks from furrow to furrow, picking up an egg here and a foolish fledgling that has wandered from the mound yonder. Very likely there may be a moorhen or two slipping about under cover of the long grass; thus hidden, they can leave the shelter of the flags and wander a distance from the brook.
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