THE WATER BABIES
all set to work, pecking and gobbling and cawing and quarrelling to their hearts' content. But the moment afterwards they all threw up their bills into the air, and gave one screech, and then turned head over heels backward, and fell down dead, one hundred and twenty-three of them at once. For why? The fairy had told the gamekeeper in a dream to fill the dead dog full of strychnine, and so he did.
And after a while the birds began to gather at Allfowlsness, in thousands and tens of thousands, blackening all the air—swans and Brent-geese, harlequins and eiders,
AND FELL DOWN DEAD.
harolds and garganeys, smews and goosanders, divers and loons, grebes and dovekies, auks and razor-bills, gannets and petrels, skuas and terns, with gulls beyond all naming or numbering; and they paddled and washed and splashed and combed and brushed themselves on the sand, till the shore was white with feathers; and they quacked and clucked and gabbled and chattered and screamed and whooped as they talked over matters with their friends, and settled where they were to go and breed that summer, till you might have heard them ten miles off; and lucky it was for them that there was no one to hear them but the old keeper, who lived all alone upon the Ness, in a turf hut thatched with heather
243
