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228 damp, moist, or marshy, as can well be imagined. The moor-hen went steadily on, with a composed and mind-made-up step, never deviating from the straight line of the netting till, upon coming to where this was continued at a right angle in another direction, it found its way through, and proceeded to cross a green road skirted with fir-trees into another Sahara-like waste, where I lost it, at least a quarter of a mile from the nearest little pond or pool. Possibly it was walking from one of these to another, but quite as probably—in my experience—it was leaving its ordinary haunts for some inland part it had discovered, where it could get food to its liking. For the moor-hens living in the little creek or stream that I used to watch would range over the adjacent meadow-land, and a few of them, having come to the limit of this, would climb up a steep bank and through a hedge at its top, down again into a little bush and bramble-grown patch on the other side. One bird, indeed, that I startled, actually climbed this bank and scrambled through the hedge into the patch, instead of flying to the water; which is as though a lady were to take up Shakespeare rather than a novel, or a servant-maid to act by reason instead of by rote. Again, I have startled a moor-hen out of a large tree standing in a thicket, and a good way back from the ditch surrounding it—such a tree as one might have expected to see a wood-pigeon fly out of, but certainly not a moor-hen.

Such variations of habit are to me more interesting than those of structure, for they represent the mind, as do the latter—which they have probably in most