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Fly-catchers flit back and forth, barn-swallows and sand-martins skim the lake, and an occasional splash or ripple at our feet shows that humbler life is getting astir. The highest life, or what modest man calls such, we have all to ourselves.
But with what a difference! For, after all, it was English, through and through. A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day at Borough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our principal drawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-tree and haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and the commons were a dream of beauty.
The Panthay paused and pointed with a laugh. Jack nodded cheerfully. "By George!" he murmured to himself, "we shan't be hard up for a hiding-place here." The wall of the farther side of the ravine was honey-combed with black holes, looking for all the world as if a colony of gigantic sand-martins had built their nests in the place.
Then there were speckled kingfishers, and also beautiful little blue and orange kingfishers, which we saw dash down like shots into the water searching for their prey. There were sand-martins something like those seen in England; and from the trees also, as we passed under the banks, rose flocks of green pigeons.
I saw sand-martins at the Orange River during a period of winter frost; it is, therefore, probable that they do not migrate even from thence. Around the reeds, which in some parts line the banks, we see fresh-water sponges. They usually encircle the stalk, and are hard and brittle, presenting numbers of small round grains near their circumference.
The steamer tooted and splashed at the landing below the fort, and turned herself about for the return trip. Sand-martins dropped from their holes in the cliffs and skimmed across the bows, and the breeze blew fresher as they headed up stream. Still the two friends sat in silence, though once Percival looked across and laughed, as though he enjoyed the other's seriousness.
Sand-Martins used to find plenty of places to breed amongst the sand-drifts, and moreover do so still. But their nesting sites are constantly changing and disappearing, and the breeding-place of one colony, that was situated in the bank of a stream twelve years ago, is now buried 10 feet or more below the surface of the sand.
The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests were not yet tenantless. The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, still enlivened by the constant skimming to and fro of the parent birds. And under Kendal's sitting-room window a pair of tomtits, which the party had watched that May Sunday, were just launching their young family on the world.
Many flocks of busy sand-martins, which here, and as far south as the Orange River, do not migrate, have perforated the banks two or three feet horizontally, in order to place their nests at the ends, and are now chasing on restless wing the myriads of tropical insects.
Sometimes they dashed into the stream; sometimes they pursued one another so quick, that the eye could scarcely follow them. In one place where a high steep sand-bank rose directly above the river, I observed many of them go in and out of holes with which the bank was bored full. Mr. A. Those were sand-martins, the smallest of our species of swallows.
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