The harrier was sitting on her newly-hatched young, and the pair of crows were feeding theirs for the last time; it was the time of the owls--and the nightingales. Silent and weary, the cuckoo came from the meadow-land to the bog, where the twilight enveloped it and hid it on its branch.
The willow-thickets and the rushes settled gradually into cool and shade; only along the promontories and banks, where the dragonflies hunted, did the mid-summer sunlight still hold its ground.
The water began to sparkle with strong, bright colours, and patches of yellow, scarlet, and blue floated about, shot with brilliant flakes of emerald and purple, which gave darkened reflections of the birch-tops.
Only a few moments before, all the sloping banks of the bog had been held by the sun; it shone upon the flowers of the wild chervil and upon a narrow strip of orange gravel that had been scraped out of one of the banks.
But now it was gone. The fully-opened hawthorn flowers reluctantly gave up their sunset blush, and shudderingly paled before the approaching gloom.
Suddenly the nightingale up in the thicket becomes silent, stops in the middle of its highest trill, and begins to snarl.
A large otter with low-set ears cautiously raises its head above the strip of gravel. It sniffs long and continuously, as it stretches its round, shaggy neck out over the ridge.
Above the distant banks on the other side of the bog, the first glow of the full moon peeps out. Like a monster toadstool, it grows up out of the horizon, sending up a cloud of purple into the air. Up and up it goes, and when almost half its disc is visible, a group of firs, whose tops stand out against it, change to a giant poppy just unfolding.
For a moment the flower stands out perfect, large and round at the end of its slender, black stalk, and then the illusion is shattered: from a toadstool the poppy has turned into a moon!
Then the otter comes right up out of the earth, with body and tail and four legs, and shuffles down the slope. A couple of herons, fishing at the edge of the bog, bend their necks and make off with hoarse, shrill trumpetings; and a herd of splashing heifers, scenting the approach of a beast of prey, begin to growl and snort.