After this little rally they went down to the alders by the stream-side,
and had enough to do, till it was growing rapidly too dark to shoot--for
the woodcock were very plentiful--it was sweet ground, too, not for
feeding only, but for lying, and that, as Harry pointed out, is a great
thing in the autumn.
The grass was short and still rich under foot, although it froze hard
every night; but all along the brook's marge there were many small oozy
bubbling springlets, which it required a stinging night to congeal; and
round these the ground was poached up by the cattle, and laid bare in
spots of deep, soft, black loam; and the innumerable chalkings told the
experienced eye at half a glance, that, where they laid up for the night
soever, here was their feeding ground, and here it had been through the
autumn.
But this was not all, for at every ten or twenty paces was a dense tuft
of willow bushes, growing for the most part upon the higher knolls where
it was dry and sunny, their roots heaped round with drift wood, from the
decay of which had shot up a dense tangled growth of cat-briers. In
these the birds were lying, all but some five or six which had run out
to feed, and were flushed, fat and large, and lazy, quite in the open
meadow.
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