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They all die of dropsies and tympanies, the men farting and the women fizzling; so that their soul takes her leave at the back-door. Some time after, walking in the island, we met three hairbrained airy fellows, who seemed mightily puffed up, and went to take their pastime and view the plovers, who live on the same diet as themselves, and abound in the island.
There were quantities of plovers, and a great many partridges, of two kinds, large and small, and the numerous lagunes were covered with and surrounded by water-fowl of all kinds wild swans and ducks, snipe, white storks, grey herons, black cormorants, and scarlet flamingoes, the last-named standing at the edge of the water, catching fish, and occasionally diving below the surface.
A curlew, motionless on his long legs, calls cheerfully from the point of sand: "Curli Curli!" Strong, cheerful old bird. The rifts of white mist are lifting from the bay, thinned into rose vapour now, as the sun creeps above the green hillsides. Swish! Three silver plovers flash back of me a clean miss. If we never missed we should never love a gun.
Down on the mud-flats at low tide you see birds called rails, and also "kill-dee" plovers. The shoveller ducks are there, too fishing up with broad, flat beaks little crabs and such creatures as are in the mud, straining out mud and water, but swallowing the rest. All these birds are "waders" and delight in mud and cold salt water. They are usually quiet, or make only strange, shrill cries.
There is another winter resort of plovers in the valley where a barren waste was ploughed some years ago. A few furze bushes still stand in the hedges about it, and the corners are full of rushes. Not all the grubbing of furze and bushes, the deep ploughing and draining, has succeeded in rendering the place fertile like the adjacent fields. The character of a marsh adheres to it still.
It was a relief from Charlotte Town, with its gossiping morning calls, its malicious stories, its political puerilities, its endless discussions on servants, turnips, and plovers; it was a bound into a region of genuine kindness and primitive hospitality. We left Charlotte Town early on a brilliant morning, in a light waggon, suitably attired for "roughing it in the bush."
Overhead a lark was soaring, and his trill, wafted down to them, mingled with their quaint human music; far away over that brown and purple stretch of bog the plovers were circling, their faint melancholy call sounding every now and then. The sun would soon set, the air was already turning a little chilly, and the dew was falling.
The plovers had their young, and followed after the carriage, swooping down in front of the horses with their well-known cry. Larks in hundreds filled the air with their joyous warble, which went straight to her heart, and the breeze began to waft to her the fresh salt flavour of the sea. There was something in it of seaweed, something of fish, but all was so wonderfully rich in recollection.
"Ay, lad; but I've lost my last flint, and I've got to knap one." The boys followed him ashore, leaving the plovers fluttering in the cage, and Dave went inside his cottage, and returned directly with a hammer and a piece of flint, which he turned over two or three times so as to get the stone in the right position, as, taught by long experience, he struck a sharp blow.
Their number was so great as to be amazing, and they had never been seen before by any of the present inhabitants of the Shoals. They are plovers of some kind, I should judge, but I do not know."
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