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Updated: May 19, 2025
For nearly two hours the tor from which we had started watched with friendly reassurance over intervening hills; then it dipped out of sight, and we were conscious of a sudden loneliness in a world of enigmatic hut-circles, peopled by sheep and peewits.
The other evening, skirting the Links, we came upon a field, where, among the brown and green nobbly grass, was gathered a sort of parliament of creatures: rooks on the fences, seagulls and peewits wheeling overhead, plovers strutting and wagging their tails; and, undisturbed by the white darting of rabbits, a covey of young partridges, hopping leisurely in compact mass.
The sun shone with agreeable warmth. There were frequent whirrs of wings in the air as small flocks of game birds rose from the water and sedge near by. "This is not the wood nor is it Brockadale; but here one may breathe a little without having his eyes looking on all sides for an enemy," said Humphrey, with satisfaction. "It is the turn of the peewits to look out. Knowest thou the peewit?"
In speaking to me, at almost our first interview, he could not refrain from an allusion to the foulness of the land; some peewits were circling over those neglected fields, and it was far from reassuring to be told though he did not intend to discourage me that "folks say, when you sees them things on the land, the farm's broke!"
But, in spite of the cold, there was a feeling of spring in the air. The great grey-backed crows were getting scarce, and the short-eared owls, which, a couple of months before, could be flushed from the tufts in the fen, to fly off looking like chubby hawks, were gone, and the flights of ducks and peewits had broken up.
Here over the short, as yet unflowering, heather, there was a mile or more of level galloping ground. She mounted steadily, and her spirit rode, as it were, before her, longing to get up there among the peewits and curlew, to feel the crisp, peaty earth slip away under her, and the wind drive in her face, under that deep blue sky.
And Clara knew this held him to her, so she trusted altogether to the passion. It, however, failed her very often. They did not often reach again the height of that once when the peewits had called. Gradually, some mechanical effort spoilt their loving, or, when they had splendid moments, they had them separately, and not so satisfactorily.
"It's a kind o' sign among the fouk in our parts, sir," he proceeded, enlightening our ignorance. "And 'e asked me to take his brass for the wife. But ah thowt nowt of it. And we lost oor connectin' files and were nobbut two platoons, and we got it somethin' cruel; the shells were a-skirling like peewits ower our heids. And Ben were knocked over and 'e never said a ward.
The squirrel was waiting for him on a bough of the oak, and while Bevis picked the fruit that had ripened since yesterday, told him the news the peewits had brought about the great rebel Choo Hoo.
The sound came from innumerable peewits, that fled and circled above the slopes of the darkening meadows below. "What an uncomfortable seer you are!" she said, "to people this dear human night with your fancies. No doubt, now, you will read between the lines of that bird speech down there?"
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