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Perhaps God would deal so by him. In its way the evening was very beautiful. The cold November day was dying into night. Clear, clear was the sky save for some black and heavy snow clouds that floated on it driven before the easterly wind that piped through the sere grasses and blew the plovers over him as though they were dead leaves.
The splendid old-gold spotting of their backs was plain enough; but immature black-bellied plovers are adorned in a similar manner, and it was necessary for us to see the rumps of our birds before we could be sure of their identity.
The crows found out that the primrose-pickers had discovered something interesting, and a few hours later the "Quirk! quirk!" of the crows announced that they were enjoying life to an unusual degree. It was found that they had removed all seven eggs from the duck's nest. In an adjacent reclaimed harbour they took the eggs of ducks, plovers, redshanks, and even larks.
The familiar fields and beaded hedge-rows, the red land, new ploughed, where the plovers hovered, the gray broken sky above, soothed Ruth like the presence of a friend, as Nature, even in her commonest moods, has ministered to many a one who has loved her before Ruth's time. Our human loves partake always of the nature of speculations.
Grouse shot up from your feet with a "Rek-ek-ek-kek!" in sudden, explosive flight. Plovers rose, wheeling round and round you with sharper and sharper cries of agitation. "Pee-vit pee-vit pee-vit! Pee-vitt!" They swooped, suddenly close, close to your eyes; you heard the drumming vibration of their wings. Away in front a line of sheep went slowly up and up Karva.
These birds always fly in pairs, though often several hundreds in a flock. Maccaos, cockatoes, plovers, and a variety of other birds of curious colours and various shapes, are to be seen in abundance; particularly one somewhat larger than a thrush, having a spur on the joint of each wing.
Enormous areas of breeding ground are now protected in the wide fringe of private fresh-water marshes of this river-intersected shore. Plovers, redshanks, terns, ducks, especially the wild mallards, are increasing. So are the black-headed gulls; even the oyster-catchers are returning. After nesting the birds lead their young to the southern point of Canvey Island.
How many balmy odours seemed to rise; how many changing colours; how many wreaths of mist were gliding over the pools, and hanging in the rushes, or spreading themselves over the moorland; while the clear sunny air was ringing with the song of larks singing in emulation! There were the plovers racing after each other, the sandpipers, the snipes, starlings, and ducks.
"Sing, sing!" cried the guide again, and clearing his throat, he began the beautiful quick-tuned canoe-song "Rose Blanche," to which the men chorused with such power of lungs that a family of plovers, which up to that time had stood in mute astonishment on a sandy point, tumbled precipitately into the water, from which they rose with a shrill, inexpressibly wild, plaintive cry, and fled screaming away to a more secure refuge among the reeds and sedges of a swamp.
No frogs, toads or eels were allowed near, but in the work of daily housecleaning, the storks and the mermaids were great friends. All water-creatures that were not thought to be polite and well behaved were expected to keep away. Even some silly birds, such as loons and plovers and all screaming and fighting creatures with wings, were warned off the premises, because they were not wanted.
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