Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/313

 all, dropping on the moor for a few days of rest only, and going straight towards the Soudan or the Blue Nile. The ever-wandering quails fell, in autumn as in spring, panting and exhausted in millions on the beach and turf, so strangely ill-fitted by nature for the long, almost perpetual, flight that nature impelled them to undertake.

There would break upon the silence of the moors at night a sound as of flames crackling and hissing over dry turf and through dry wood; and it was but the noise of a mile-long troop of wild ducks coming from the Polar seas to the Tuscan lagoons.

The kittiwake and the tarn and the storm swallow forsook their Finnish fjords and Greenland rocks to come and fish in the blue Ligurian waves. The graceful and vivacious actodroma, and the trustful sanderling, alighted here in simple good faith to escape the death grip of the Arctic ice. The cheery godwits settled upon sea or sand, and looked like clouds of silvery smoke touched by red rays of flame. The shore was peopled with the feathered exiles of the north, whilst, inland, the common buzzards arrived with the first gold of autumn to wage