Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/330

 coot away as she brought the rushes together to begin a home.

All the moist ground that stretched for leagues on leagues southward, ground that trembled with water as human eyes will do with unshed tears, was covered with little feathered people who loved the marsh, and pool, and found health and nourishment where men found death.

There the sedge thrush hung his nest upon a bulrush, lining it with cobwebs and with shred rosemary as softly as a lady sleeps on down; there the bearded titmouse would slumber upon a reed, covering tenderly with his wing the female he loved so well; there the pewits, and the finches, and the chats, and the cricket singers, and the grasshopper warblers, and all the multitudes of oscines, fluttered and flirted, and darted and dived, and made the lonely wastes mirthful and peopled. The fisher-heron, as timid a solitary as any that the Thebaïd knew, walked by choice rather beside the brackish pools where fresh and salt water met, or along the white line of the rippling surf, eyes downward and head bent, meditative, melancholy, and absorbed. The sheldrake shared his taste for those saline shallows