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The protocols were now ready, and the fox had already taken the document to sign, when there was a rush of wings, and in came six or seven of those princes and archdukes among them the archduke of the peewits to whom independence was to be restored.
The meadow might have been called a plovery as we say rookery and heronry for the green plovers or peewits always had several nests in it. The course of the humble bees that went by could be watched for some way their large size and darker colour made them visible as they now went down into the grass, and now started forward again.
Tops of gates and hedges appeared above the flood, and sea-gulls, driven inland by the gales, swam over the pastures. Flocks of peewits, starlings, and red-wings collected on the uplands, and an occasional heron might be seen flitting majestically across the storm-flecked sky.
Pausing to look back a moment there were meads under the hill with the shortest and greenest herbage, perpetually watered, and without one single buttercup, a strip of pure green among yellow flowers and yellowing corn. A few hollow oaks on whose boughs the cuckoos stayed to call, two or three peewits coursing up and down, larks singing, and for all else silence.
The peewits had come down and were mewing in the dappled skies, and on the telegraph wires the high-shouldered swallows sat in rows preparing for flight; in the hedgerows the dead hemlocks, brittle as fine shells, were ready to scatter their pale seeds at a touch, and the blackberries, on which as the West Country saying has it, the devil had already laid his finger, were filmed with mildew.
A party of the peewits, who had been watching ever so far away, thought they saw a stir and a movement in the woods; and presently out came one of the captains of the wood-pigeons with two hundred of his soldiers, and they flew over the border into King Kapchack's country and began to forage in one of his wheat-fields, where the corn was ripe.
These birds in a flock utter a noise, that singularly resembles the cry of a pack of small dogs in full chase: waking in the night, I have more than once been for a moment startled at the distant sound. In appearance and habits it resembles in many respects our peewits; its wings, however, are armed with sharp spurs, like those on the legs of the common cock.
Seeing this for his soldiers who were wheeling about in the air came and told him the captain of the peewits thought: "Now is my time! This is a most lucky and fortunate circumstance, and I can now win the high approval of King Kapchack, and obtain promotion.
The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad.
The peewits were circling over me with eerie cries, and now and then on the moor-side the curlews would be crying into the night lonely as I was lonely; and in every heather tussock I would be seeing shapes, and dreading the thought of the Nameless Man and his brindled hunter, till my hair was like to rise on my head, and I would feel it in my legs to be running, but that I kent my folk, dead and gone, would be laughing at me, in their own place, for our past folk are not so much dead as just away, and maybe watching; and maybe I would be comforting myself with the thought that the Killer would be dead long syne in the course of nature he and his great dog but for all that I had a twig of rowan in my hand, for the night was not canny.
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