harmony with nature, with the stillness, the sadness, the loneliness. This standing or pacing about whilst calling roopily, and, as it were, in a stealthy manner to each other, should be a very prosaic affair, one would think, for a pair of peewits after such glorious flying, but, no doubt, there is some excitement in it. Perhaps it is thought a little fast, as some slow things with us are, and hence the peculiar charm.
"Now these two birds are standing lazily on two of the black molehills which are all about the marshy land—some of them of a size beyond one's comprehension—and making the wire-drawn cry at intervals to each other. Lazily they stand, lazily they utter it, and seem as though they had taken up their roosting-place for the night. But when the night falls they will be hurrying shadows in it, and their cries will come out of the darkness, mingling with the bleatings of the snipe."
There is a sameness and yet a constant difference in the aerial sports and evolutions of peewits. It is like a continual variation of the same air or a recurrent thread of melody winding itself through a labyrinth of ever-changing notes. Parts of the melody are where two skim low over the ground in rapid pursuit of each other. One settles, the other skims on, then makes a great upward sweep, turns, sweeps down and back again, again rises, turns and sweeps again, and so on, rising and falling over the same wide space with the regular motions and long rushing swing of a pendulum. Each time it comes rushing down upon the bird that has settled, and each time, at the right moment, this one makes a little ascension towards it, sometimes floating above
