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Then again, when, on a sultry afternoon in this first summer of Murphy's life, some older members of the family betook themselves to such cool places on the eyot as the shadows cast by the wide eaves of the mill, it was ordered they were to be left in peace and not plagued by younger folk, however good-natured they might be.
So they kissed and departed; and Birdalone went home to the house, and wore the days thereafter doing what was needful about the stead, and wandering through the meadows, and swimming the waters about Green Eyot; and the days were not unrestful unto her.
For a while indeed she knew not whither she was wending, and if her face were verily turned toward the land under the wood; but as the morning wore the blue distance began to grow green, and then she saw that a great wood was indeed before her, and thereafter, as it cleared yet more, she knew the land she was nearing for the meadows of the House under the Wood, and it was not long thence ere she saw clear and close Green Eyot and Rocky Eyot, though the house was yet hidden from her by the green shores of the first of those two isles.
Moorhens evidently migrate up or down the river in spring and autumn, and occasionally dabchicks; otherwise their sudden appearance and disappearance on the eyot could not be accounted for. Snipe follow the Thames up the valley.
Lo thou, they are taking the water, but they are making for the eyot and not our shore: son mine, this will mean a hazeled field in the long run; but now they will look for us to come to them therein. Yea, now they are aland and have pitched their white shield. And hearken, that is their horn; blow we an answer: ho, noise! set thy lips to the brass."
There is one such just above Marston Ferry, near Oxford, on the Cherwell, and two in a field below Ardington, near Lockinge. On September 16, 1896, after a period of very stormy wet weather, I saw a great migration of swallows down the Thames. It was a dark, dripping evening, and the thick osier bed on Chiswick Eyot was covered with wet leaf.
He hurried away, and Dale looked after him. "Something must ha' worried his lordship," said the man. "First time I've ever seen him in a bad temper. An' what about Eyot? Three to one the paper says. P'raps he'll think of it in the morning." Not until he was dressing, and the contents of his pockets were spread on a table, did Medenham remember Dale's commission. It was quite true, as he told Mrs.
In the second week of September there is usually an immense migration of house-martins and swallows down the river. I have already described what I once saw on a migration night on Chiswick Eyot. Sometimes they go on past London, and find themselves near Thames mouth with no osier beds or shelter of any kind. Then they settle on ships.
The other ladies each had their men, as Cicely Elliott had the old knight. One of them had even six, who one day fought a mêlée for her favours on an eyot before the manor windows. These men came by barge in the evenings, or rode over the flats with a spare horse to take their mistresses a-hawking after the herons in the swampy places.
A flock of sandpipers remained there for some weeks, and during the summer numbers of sedge-warblers have nested on and around the eyot; the cuckoo has been a regular visitor to the osier-bed in the early morning, probably with a view to laying its eggs in the sedge-warblers' nests.
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