ng, shivering, and
by the scruff of the neck, first the king's son, then the king's
daughter, and stopped not till she had placed them high up the bank,
safe among the thorn-scrub, where they crouched together, side by side,
listening to the cataclysmal threshings of the blind devil down in the
black waters below there; and their father, the king, came
up--pad-pad-pad-pad--behind them, to thunder out defiance at all the
world above their sturdy, broad, intelligent heads, and purr his joy at
their return. Moreover, he looked proud as he stood there in the
moonlight, that royal beast; and I like to think it was not all looks
either.

XI

THE HIGHWAYMAN OF THE MARSH

There was some sort of violent trouble going on down in the reeds
beside the dike. The reed-buntings--some people might easily have
mistaken them for sparrows, with their black heads and white
mustaches--said so, swaying and balancing upon the bending reeds, and
calling the makers of that trouble names in a harsh voice.

And all the rest of the reed-people were saying so, too. It was an
amazing thing how full of wild-folk that apparently deserted reed-patch
was. Each bit of the landscape, each typical portion, is a world of
its own, with its special kind of population. This one produced
unexpectedly a pair of sedge-warblers and a reed-warbler, atoms who
gyrated and grated their annoyance; a willow-tit, who made needle-point
rebukes; a water-rail, with a long beak and long legs, running away
like a long-legged pullet; a moorhen very much concerned as to her
nest; a big rat very much concerned as to the moorhen's nest, too, but
in a different way; a grass snake, who glistened as if newly painted in
the sun; and a spotted crake, who is even more of a running winged
ventriloquial mystery than the corn-crake of our childhood's hay-times.

All of them were on thorns--though on reeds, really--and evidently
highly rattled and in a state of nerves over the trouble in the reeds.
And not much wonder either, for, judging by the sounds, murder was
being done in there among the secret recesses of the swishing green
stems--murder cruel and violent, in spite of the sunshine and the light
of day.

And then, all of a sudden, in the midst of almost a gasp of silent
horror, a moment of speechlessness on the part of the wild lookers-on,
out came the trouble, rolling over and over and over upon the soft,
short-cropped grass of the dike-bank, and--they all saw. A