Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/169

 NOW and ice, ice and snow, far as the eye could reach into the mist that hung over the marshes; every broad gutter fringed with an icy border where the last flood had reached, every hollow where the water had lodged firm enough to walk on; flakes of cat-ice where the water had sunk, and packed broken fragments piled on the edge of the time-encrusted grass; the broad Dee saltings resembled the Arctic regions rather than Cheshire. These frozen marshes were a scene of desolation different from summer days, when the air danced above the short-cropped gram of rich turf, pasturage of hundreds of sheep, and when bright-plumaged sheldrakes flew past, when noisy lapwings called and redshanks yelped over the green plains. A bitter east wind sweeping across the reclaimed levels of Sealand cut like a knife, it was almost torture to face it; yet the cold winter sun struggling through the mist that veiled the distant Welsh shore made the ice particles glitter and sparkle. It was very beautiful, but very cold.

Hungry fieldfares, redwings, and mistle thrushes looted the red berries from the wind-swept thorns or sheltered in the evergreen oaks in the Hall garden. Skylarks in hundreds searched the tide wrack, every little head down as they ran like mice amongst the debris left by the water; now and again a twittering flock would rise and pass out into the mist towards some liker bank that they knew well. Black-headed gulls, though now unadorned by brown hoods, beat to and fro, waiting for the