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Updated: June 13, 2025
For several days, upon paying their morning visit to the birds and other pets in the inclosure in the garden, Chebron and Mysa had observed an unusual timidity among them. The wildfowl, instead of advancing to meet them with demonstrations of welcome, remained close among the reeds, and even the ibis did not respond at once to their call.
Wild geese, curlews, and wimbrels with sharp, snipe-like beaks, are shot occasionally by the farmers. A few woodcocks, snipe, and wildfowl also visit us. In the winter the short-eared owls come; they are rarer than their long-eared relatives, who stay with us all the year. The common barn owl, of a white, creamy colour, is the screech owl that we hear on summer nights.
Well, I hope your luck with your lady will be more magnificent than mine has been here; but mind Captain De Stancy! he's a fearful wildfowl for you. 'He's a harmless inoffensive soldier, as far as I know. If he is not let him be what he may for me. 'And do his worst to cut you out, I suppose?
"But," objects the English wildfowl shooter, "suppose the birds are not get-at-able in any other way?" "So much," the American would retort, "the better for the birds. They have earned their lives; get them like a sportsman or let them go."
Although these waters are infested with pirates and smugglers, as evidenced by such names as "Dead Man's Grave," "Robbers' Point," "Grave Island," "Pirates' Creek" and the like, Europeans are but seldom molested, and although generally taking my Winchester as a precautionary measure when going any distance from port, I have spent many delightful days in standing out to sea, sailing through the numerous creeks with which the hinterland is intersected, or in cruising amongst the islands, on which sometimes I would land, and creeping round the rocky shores with my gun would frequently surprise wildfowl feeding amongst the shallow bays and pools.
The popularity of the park continued throughout the Stuart period. Charles II. after the Restoration employed a Frenchman, Le Nôtre, to lay out the grounds, and under his advice the canal was formed from the chain of pools that spread across the low-lying ground, and also a decoy, where ducks and wildfowl resorted. Rosamund's Pond, an oblong pool, lay at the south-west end of the canal.
On that lonely coast, seldom visited in summer, and wholly cut off from human communication in winter, they might have lived and died with as little recognition from the world as the minks and wildfowl with whom they were tenants in common, but for a circumstance which called into exercise unsuspected qualities of generous courage and heroic self- sacrifice.
There was no wind now, but a wonderful exhilarating freshness crept into the cooling air, and the stillness was only broken by the clamour of startled wildfowl which presently sank again. Agatha could see them paddling in clusters about the gleaming sloo. "Those are ducks wild ones?" she asked. "Yes," said Wyllard; "duck of various kinds. Most of them the same as your English ones."
What was extraordinary in his or any other day was the generous enthusiasm which made a young Scotch laird deliberately determine that he would do something more with his life than shoot wildfowl or play cards, made him throw himself first with a curious mixture of vanity and genuine devotion to a noble cause into the Corsican struggle for liberty, and then, vain of his birth and fortune as he was, place himself at the feet, not of a duke or a minister, but of a man of low origin, rough exterior, and rougher manners, in whom he simply saw the best and wisest man he had known.
For several days after this they plodded steadily onward, sometimes over the mountains or across the grassy plains, where migrating reindeer supplied them with abundant venison; at other times among lakelets and streams, whose excellent fish and innumerable wildfowl provided them with variety for the table and music for the ear.
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