on the dust, and gave a few vigorous strokes with her legs
to make herself more comfortable. Occasionally they all crooned and
wailed together, and at the passing of a cart all stood up defiantly,
as if intending to hold their fort at all hazards. Presently a woman
came out of a house-door opposite, at which the whole party ran
furiously and breathlessly across the road, as if their lives depended
upon arriving in time. There was not a gesture or a motion that was
not admirably conceived, intensely dramatic.

Again, what is more delightfully absurd than to see a hen find a large
morsel which she cannot deal with at one gulp? She has no sense of
diplomacy or cunning; her friends, attracted by her motions, close in
about her; she picks up the treasured provender, she runs, bewildered
with anxiety, till she has distanced her pursuers; she puts the object
down and takes a couple of desperate pecks; but her kin are at her
heels; another flight follows, another wild attempt; for half an hour
the same tactics are pursued. At last she is at bay; she makes one
prodigious effort, and gets the treasure down with a convulsive
swallow; you see her neck bulge with the moving object; while she looks
at her baffled companions with an air of meek triumph.

Ducks, too, afford many simple joys to the contemplative mind. A slow
procession of white ducks, walking delicately, with heads lifted high
and timid eyes, in a long line, has the air of an ecclesiastical
procession. The singers go before, the minstrels follow after. There
is something liturgical, too, in the way in which, as if by a
preconcerted signal, they all cry out together, standing in a group,
with a burst of hoarse cheering, cut off suddenly by an intolerable
silence. The arrival of ducks upon the scene, when the fowls are fed,
is an impressive sight. They stamp wildly over the pasture, falling,
stumbling, rising again, arrive on the scene with a desperate
intentness, and eat as though they had not seen food for months.

The pleasure of these farm-yard sights is two-fold. It is partly the
sense of grave, unconscious importance about the whole business,
serious lives lived with such whole-hearted zeal. There is no sense of
divided endeavour; the discovery of food is the one thing in the world,
and the sense of repletion is also the sense of virtue. But there is
something pathetic, too, about the taming to our own ends of these
forest beasts, these woodland birds