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Updated: June 23, 2025
It seemed half-pleasant, half-pathetic to think of them as they went about their work, sturdy, cheerful figures, looking out over the wide fen with all its clear pools and reed-beds, growing old in the familiar scene, passing from the dormitory to the infirmary, and from the infirmary to the graveyard, in a sure and certain hope.
Everyone who has travelled over Eastern England knows the smaller country-houses with which it is studded the rather dank little buildings, usually in the Italian style, surrounded with parks of some eighty to a hundred acres. For me they have always had a very strong attraction, with the grey paling of split oak, the noble trees, the meres with their reed-beds, and the line of distant woods.
Thus, the streams are fished by herons, grebes, and kingfishers, while the rushy margins are worked by coots and gallinules, and, above the surface, reed and sedge-warblers, with other kinds, inhabit the reed-beds.
'Aye! we had a glorious gallop after Starlight and his gang, When they bolted from Sylvester's on the flat; How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang To the strokes of Mountaineer and Acrobat!
His nostrils dilated like a horse's, and his eyes were restless. We were now in a shallow vale, through which a little stream flowed among broad reed-beds. At one point he kneeled on the ground and searched diligently. "See," he said, "a horse's prints not two hours old a horse going west." Presently I myself found a clue. I picked up from a clump of wild onions a thread of coloured wool.
It is my privilege to be able to furnish this, though in a sort of ambiguous way, having received the information in confidence. Here it is: In a bend, on the north bank of the Murray, a few miles from Charley's hut, is a tract, about a hundred acres in extent, of fine grass land, completely isolated by billabongs, reed-beds, dense scrub, and steep ridges of loose sand.
"Then may I have a shot at the first heron I see?" "Nay, nay; don't let's scar' the birds, lad. It's netting to-day. We'll shute another time when they wean't come near the net." Dick gave way, and Dave took the pole, to send the light punt skimming over the water, and in and out among the reed-beds through which, puzzling as they would have been to a stranger, he thrust the vessel rapidly.
In summer the marshes near the mounds are merely pools of water connected by channels through the reed-beds, but in spring the flood-water converts them into a vast lagoon, and all that meets the eye are a few small hamlets built on rising knolls above the water-level.
Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-house between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long summer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestry room" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the description of the huntsman on the "arras," in "Tristram and Iseult"; the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir, where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful mistress, Mrs.
Beyond the red wall the parallel lines of the elm avenue swept down to the blue and silver levels of the Long Water, the alder copses bordering which showed black-purple, and the reed-beds rusty as a fox, against thin stretches of still unmelted snow. The avenue climbed the farther ascent to the wide archway of the red and gray gate-house, just short of the top of the long ridge of bare moorland.
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