eigneur; gentle old women in white caps, blue-eyed children, kind dogs,
fresh air, and _life_!

There is a mysterious fascination about that half-hour before the first
glimmer of dawn. The leaves, this September morning, are shivering in
the dusk of my garden; the house is as silent as my sleeping cat save
for the resonant tick-tock, tick-tock, of the tall Norman clock in the
kitchen, to which I tiptoe down and breakfast by candle-light.

You should see the Essence of Selfishness then as she purrs around a
simmering saucepan of milk destined for my coffee, and inspects the
toast and jam, and sniffs at my breech-loader, well greased with
neatsfoot-oil, and now the ghostly light in the courtyard tells me to
hurry out on the bay.

Low tide. Far out on the desert of black clay a colony of gulls have
spent the night. Their quarrelsome jargon reaches me as I cautiously
raise my head over the dunes, for often a band of plover is feeding at
dawn out on the mud, close enough for a shot. Nothing in view save the
gulls, those gossiping concierges of the bay, who rise like a squall of
snow as I make a clean breast of my presence, and start across the
soggy, slippery mud toward the marsh running out to the open sea. A
curlew, motionless on his long legs, calls cheerfully from the point of
sand: "Curli--Curli!" Strong, cheerful old bird. The rifts of white mist
are lifting from the bay, thinned into rose vapour now, as the sun
creeps above the green hillsides.

Swish! Three silver plovers flash back of me--a clean miss. If we never
missed we should never love a gun. It is time now to stalk the bottoms
of the narrow, winding causeways that drain the bay. Their beds at low
tide are full of dead mussels, dormant clams, and awkward sputtering
crabs; the old ones sidling away from you with threatening claws wide
open for combat; the young ones standing their ground bravely, in
ignorance.

Swish again! But this time I manage to kill them both--two fat golden
plovers. The Essence of Selfishness shall have her fill at noon, and the
pupils of her green eyes will contract in ecstasy as she crunches and
gnaws.

Now all the bay is alive. Moreover, the sea is sweeping in, filling the
bay like a bath-tub, obliterating the causeways under millions of
dancing ripples of turquoise. Soon my decoys are out, and I am sunk in a
sand-pit at the edge of the sea. The wind holds strong from the
northeast, and I am kept busy until my gun-barrels are to