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Updated: June 10, 2025
Several times we had to turn aside to avoid the swampy ponds, fringed with tall saw-grass; from amid which rose snipes, plovers, and wild-ducks, and occasionally flocks of the beautiful white egret and snowy heron. The water was brackish, and covered with lilies of varied colours; from amid which, every now and then, alligators popped out their heads to look at us.
We should soon have exhausted our ammunition had we continued to pop away at the wild-ducks and plovers which rose from the ponds; besides which, the captain had given strict orders that no shots should be fired, lest the sound might be heard by any of the bands of Indians prowling in the vicinity, who thus might have been induced, on discovering the smallness of our party, to attack us.
Of the two dozen species of American wild-ducks, none has a wider celebrity than that known as the canvas-back; even the eider-duck is less thought of, as the Americans care little for beds of down.
The farm was not so large or rambling as to tire the mind or foot, yet wide enough and full of change rich pasture, hazel copse, green valleys, fallows brown, and golden breast-lands pillowing into nooks of fern, clumps of shade for horse or heifer, and for rabbits sandy warren, furzy cleve for hare and partridge, not without a little mere for willows and for wild-ducks.
He has "done it," and its use and pleasure are therefore departed in his eyes. He knows quite well that though it is called the Squire's, in token, probably, of some wholesale slaughter of wild-ducks effected by Carew from its convenient cover, that this tree is hundreds of years old the oldest in all the chase.
They ran to the mill three or four times to tell their father that the brown tent was still under the bank in the carr, and that they could see nobody; though the wild-ducks and geese made such a fluttering and noise, now and then, that it seemed as if some one was lurking about the ponds.
They were at once saluted by a platoon fire, and four victims strewed the ground and water with their white, brown, and blue feathers. "These are the first aquatic birds we have met with," said Sumichrast; "it will not be long now before we are among the marshes." "What birds are wild-ducks related to?" asked Lucien. "To swans and geese, Master Sunbeam," replied my friend.
So it ran and flew over the hedge. "On it ran. At last it came to a great moor where wild-ducks lived; here it lay the whole night, and was so tired and melancholy. In the morning up flew the wild-ducks, and saw their new comrade; 'Who are you? asked they; and our little duck turned on every side, and bowed as well as it could. 'But you are tremendously ugly! said the wild-ducks.
Small lakes of accumulated surface-water are passed in depressions having no outlet; thickets and bulrushes are growing around the edges, and the surfaces of some are fairly black with multitudes of wild-ducks.
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