their bills, and dabble, and throw up their heads and enjoy something,
and then tell the others about it. Therefore I knew at once, by the way
they were carrying on, that there must be something or other gone wholly
amiss in the duck-world. Sister Annie perceived it too, but with a
greater quickness; for she counted them like a good duck-wife, and could
only tell thirteen of them, when she knew there ought to be fourteen.

And so we began to search about, and the ducks ran to lead us aright,
having come that far to fetch us; and when we got down to the foot of
the court-yard where the two great ash-trees stand by the side of the
little water, we found good reason for the urgence and melancholy of the
duck-birds. Lo! the old white drake, the father of all, a bird of high
manners and chivalry, always the last to help himself from the pan of
barley-meal, and the first to show fight to a dog or cock intruding upon
his family, this fine fellow, and pillar of the state, was now in a sad
predicament, yet quacking very stoutly. For the brook, wherewith he
had been familiar from his callow childhood, and wherein he was wont to
quest for water-newts, and tadpoles, and caddis-worms, and other game,
this brook, which afforded him very often scanty space to dabble in,
and sometimes starved the cresses, was now coming down in a great brown
flood, as if the banks never belonged to it. The foaming of it, and the
noise, and the cresting of the corners, and the up and down, like a wave
of the sea, were enough to frighten any duck, though bred upon stormy
waters, which our ducks never had been.

There is always a hurdle six feet long and four and a half in depth,
swung by a chain at either end from an oak laid across the channel. And
the use of this hurdle is to keep our kine at milking time from straying
away there drinking (for in truth they are very dainty) and to fence
strange cattle, or Farmer Snowe's horses, from coming along the bed of