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"No I'm going to dig it out, again," said Barton, "after we take another week off to drum into those quarter-brained mud-hens just what it is we want them to do again and then persuade them to do it again and then hope against hope that nothing happens along to distract them again. Any suggestions?" Simpson shook his head. "Take a rest, Barton. Things will look brighter in the morning."
Then, as likely as not, a few days later, what is called a 'goose winter' a heavy, wet snowstorm followed by colder weather may come along and try to drive the birds all back again; but before the bad weather completes its useless work a timely south wind may arrive, and with the aid of a milder spell, will utterly destroy the 'goose winter'. Then, after that, the sky soon becomes mottled with flying birds of many kinds: gray geese, laughing geese, waveys, and white geese, as well as great flocks of ducks of many kinds; also mud-hens, sawbills, waders, plovers, curlew, pelicans, swans, and cranes, both white and gray.
On the train they had been boys, but now they were men, looking at the tranquil, listening to the immortal. "Did you speak?" Henry asked. "No," said Richmond, "it was October." They floated out on the lake. Mud-hens, in their midsummer fluttering, had woven the rushes into a Gobelin tapestry.
Despite his vast bulk, he was not observed, or was more probably mistaken for a hill, for presently the mud-hens assembled in a glade, before his eyes, and made a fire by rubbing dry sticks together.
These, with the noisy crested jays, an occasional "camp-robber," the little nuthatches, the cheerful canyon wren with his rollicking song, the happy water-ousel, "kill-deer," and road-runners and the water birds, ducks, geese, and mud-hens, with an occasional crane, made up the bird life seen in the open country and in these upper canyons.
It was a beautiful place. Down a hill the wheat swam toward a village whose elevator was a glistening tower. Mud-hens gabbled in a slew, alfalfa shone with unearthly green, and bees went junketing toward a field of red clover. But she had the motorist's fever to go on. The road behind and in front was very long, very white and very empty.
They cooked fish and roots over the fire, and the savor of the banquet was so appetizing that Maui could not resist the temptation: he reached out and confiscated the dinner, and the mud-hens flew off crying.
The Young Person vegetates best in the atmosphere of parlours and ball-rooms; if she infested the fields and roadsides like the squirrels, lizards, and mud-hens, she would be as ruthlessly exterminated as they. Every passing sportsman would fill her with duck-shot, and every strolling gentleman would step out of his way to smite off her head with his cane, as one decapitates a thistle.
Out in the sloughs they marked the earnest red-heads from the north and accomplished two mud-hens, a ruddy duck, and a dozen blackbirds.
I read all the books the "stack" at the university could afford me on New Testament life and times, in preparation for my play on Judas. My only companions were a flock of tiny mud-hens with their dainty proud little rooster.
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