I bit my lip.
"Of course those are not all plovers' eggs," said I, taking up one of a creamy color spotted with brown, which was quite different to the gray ones mottled with black, that seemed to have been designed to escape detection on the gray beach, where they are generally found. "This is a dabchick's egg."
"I see you know more about birds than most young ladies do," said Mr. Harrod; "but I should call that a moor-hen's egg. And as for the gray plover, it is a migratory bird; it does not breed in England."
I suppose I still looked unconvinced, for he added, pleasantly, "Come, I'll bet you anything you like; and if we can be lucky enough to find a bird on the eggs, I'll prove it you now."
He turned round and began walking slowly along the bank of the dike, close to the water's edge. I gave Taff a friendly cuff to keep him quiet, for he was rather excitable, and it was necessary that we should be very wary if we wanted to surprise the bird sitting.
Mr. Harrod crept cautiously along, and I followed; I was as anxious now as he was, and by this simple means I was entrapped into a walk with my sworn enemy. A brown bird with a long bill got up among the reeds, and flew in a halting manner down to the water. It was a water-rail, and Mr. Harrod said so—for these birds are rarer upon the dike than the moor-hens and pewits, of which there are a great number, and I suppose he imagined I would not know it.
Something moved in the growing rushes at our feet; but it was only a couple of black moor-hens, who took to their heels, so to speak, with great velocity, and made little flights in the air with their legs hanging down and their bodies very perpendicular. We stood and laughed at them a minute, they were so very absurd out of their proper element; but when they took to the water they were pretty enough, the little red shields standing out upon their black foreheads as they jerked their heads in swimming.
I came upon a mother moor-hen presently tending her little brood; the large flat nest, built of dried rushes, lay in the overhanging branches of a willow-shrub, and she stood on the bank hard by. She did not fly or run away as other birds do when frightened, but stood there croaking as if in anger, and fluttering anxiously round the place where the six little balls of black down showed their red heads above the edge of the nest.
I held Taff by the collar, to prevent his doing any mischief, and we left the poor faithful mother undisturbed. We had not found any plovers' eggs since we had begun to look. They are always hard to find, being laid upon the open ground, sometimes on the very beach, where they almost look like little pebbles themselves, and sometimes in furrows and clefts of the earth, but always without any nest to mark the place. I suppose I had pretty well scoured this particular reach.
About a hundred yards farther on, however, the strange cry that distinguishes the bird we sought fell upon our ears; a cock lapwing flew up, his long feathery crest erect, and tumbled over and over in the air in the manner peculiar to his kind, uttering all the while the plaintive "cheep, cheep" that means distress and anxiety.