on
of its own, would hesitate, waver, finally swing down to investigate. At
this, Mr. Kincaid's call became confidential and intimate. It uttered
all sorts of clucks and half-notes, telling, probably, of the manifold
advantages of feed and shelter offered by this particular pond. Then
came the slow circles ending with the final breathless, level-winged
rush.

But presently, as the sun mounted higher and higher, even these flights
ceased. Mr. Kincaid lit his pipe. Curly made trip after trip, carrying
in the game.

"Fun?" enquired Mr. Kincaid succinctly.

"I should think so!" breathed Bobby with rapture.

They sat opposite each other in the sociable silence that seemed to come
so easily to them. The wind had risen again, until now it had once more
attained the proportions of a respectable gale. Bobby liked to watch the
brisk puffs as they hit, spread in a fan-shaped ruffle of dark water and
skittered away. In the miniature wavelets possible under the lea, the
decoys bobbed gravely, swinging to their anchor strings. The sun flashed
from their backs, and from the little waves. All about were the tall
stalks of reeds; and ahead, where the open water was, grew tufts of
grasses that looked silvery-brown and somehow intimate when, as now,
Bobby looked at them from their own plane of elevation. They waved and
bent before the wind, and the reeds across the pond bowed and recovered;
and over the low, flat landscape seemed to hover a brown, untamed spirit
of wildness.

But, though the wind blew a gale, the duck-boat was so snugly hidden
that hardly a breath reached its occupants. The warm rays of the sun
shone full down upon them, first driving the early chill from Bobby's
bones, then making him sleepy. He fell into a delicious lethargy,
running over drowsily the small details of his immediate surroundings.
In the course of a few hours this cosy nest which he had never seen
before had become strangely familiar. He experienced a sense of personal
acquaintanceship with many of the individual reeds; he recognized, as
one recognizes an accustomed landscape, the angle at which certain
clumps crossed one another; or the vistas allowed by the different
interstices. A marsh wren had business among the galleries. Bobby
watched it hop in and out of sight, sometimes right side up, sometimes
upside down. A dozen times he thought it had gone; but always it came
back, flirting its absurd short tail, one bright eye fixed on the
occupants o