double-handed punt, and took that final look-round to see that everything was in its place upon which so much depends.

It was still freezing hard as we got afloat, a dense white mist as thick as cotton wool hanging over everything for the first five minutes. This, and the utter absence of sounds, save for the light splash of water on the quays behind or occasional cries of gulls overhead, gave a strangely vague and eerie feeling to us as we paddled out into the unseen. A wildfowl punt is, at the best of times, not a substantial affair; its whole purpose is to be unobtrusive, and it carries shallowness to the utmost limit of safety. But when you cannot see what little of it there really is for white mist, and can make nothing out ahead or behind, can hear nothing

but the derisive laughter of a gull or two flapping by at the level of your knees, perhaps nothing but the unexplored feelings of floating on a tea-tray through a cloudy region of upper air would fitly represent the resulting sensations! It was only the fact that I had implicit trust in the weather knowledge of my companion, who had lived all his life one foot on sea and one on land,' which prevented me from thinking during those first few hundred yards of nebulous paddling that our quest was hopeless. However, Alleyn was content; his ruddy long-shore face was grim with repressed hope, so it was not for me to doubt. And presently events proved he was right. We had crept out on our tea-tray' into the land-locked estuary, all around being still

6

exceeding dim and cold and uncomfortable, when a voice observed out of the haze at my shoulder, that the mist would lift in a minute; and sure enough, almost as though it had heard the observation, a soft clammy breath of air came upon our cheeks, the thick white curtain of obscurity carded itself out into indefinitely fine filaments, there dawned a glimmer of pale light on the surface of the water in front, a suspicion of blue in the sky overhead. With startling rapidity the mist faded to extremest attenuity, and then finally drifted by, letting us out with the suddenness of an open doorway into a clear world of wintry waters lined by long, low, marshy flats to the right, a low ruby winter sun rising heavy and reluctant over the hills in the east, and a thousand acres of lagoon and salt-water estuary lying clear under his level beams in front of us.

At once we proceeded to clear for action. My companion, with a few strokes of his short paddles, turned us for a moment into a reedy bight of the shore, and there, floating cheerfully in eight inches of water, we made our arrangements. The big gun over the bows, which hitherto had been swaddled up in flannels to keep it from the salt mists, was stripped – a formidable piece of ordnance nearly eight feet long, and capable of throwing a pound of shot at a discharge-our two shoulder guns were taken from their cases, they looking extraordinarily slender by comparison with the monster over the bows, and having seen that the cartridges were handy and made all snug, we put to sea again.

Keeping close round under the shadows of the frozen shore we eagerly watched the surface of the rapidly brightening water for birds which we knew were upon it. There was an early heron standing grim and sentinel-like at the end of a sandspit and waiting for the dropping tide to clear his feeding-ground, while here and there fortunate loons, whose appetites did not need to wait on tides, were diving vigorously for a breakfast; but for a time there was nothing else. Then, as we watched and punted slowly round the fringe of the broad estuary, the red gleam in the west broadened, till under it every patch of floating ice upon the grey surface of the water shone like a ruddy spangle of metal. I was just thinking how cold the wind was, and reflecting a little gloomily that my host on shore, from the warm shelter of the bedclothes, must be picturing us freezing to death on this slopping tea-tray in the open, when my eye was caught by something far away against the red shine like a tag of smoke left by a passing steamer. Yet it was not smoke, and, more than that, it was travelling in our direction and extending against the wind as

smoke never did. What is that, Alleyn?' I said, pointing to the long dark cloud now low down against the surface of the water, and he, having stared towards the spot indicated for a minute, sedately knocked the ashes from his pipe against the palm of his hand, and answered, Widgeon, and a thousand at least!' did not need to discuss the situation, but we watched with bated breath the mighty flock drop about a mile up the water, and then we slipped off our overcoats and, placing them upon the floor of the punt, went down as flat as we could lie, I with my chin upon the cartridge box under the stock of the big gun forward, and Alleyn asprawl behind me. The long paddles were shipped, and,

with a short wooden scoop like a glorified butter-pat maker in either hand, we proceeded to steal slowly down upon the fowl.

It is extraordinary what an instant improvement of climate had followed the sight of these ducks! Five minutes before I was ready to assert the near approach of a third glacial period, and to prove it by personal reminiscences of which that moment had been assuredly the coldest on record, and then, at the mere mention of widgeon, we had apparently passed from the rawest of winter mornings to a delightfully genial state of temperature, with which the snowfields about, and the fleecy patches of floating snow through which we now and then crunched, were utterly out of keeping. Possibly the punting may have had something to do with it. To lie flat on one's front with arms extended