While this was going on a second young bird had been on the old nest on the little island in the lake, quietly dozing; and at length this one got off his dozing-place, and swam out to where the weed-fishing and feeding were in progress. As he came up, the old coot rose with a white stem in her beak, which the new-comer pushed forward to take; but the other thrust himself before him, and, snatching the stem from his parent's beak, swallowed it himself. The old coot remained perfectly motionless for a space of about four seconds, looking fixedly at the greedy one who had been gorging for twenty {258} minutes yet refused to give place to the other. Then very suddenly, and with incredible fury, she dashed at and began hunting him over the pond. In vain he rose up and flew over the water, beating the surface with his feet, uttering cries of terror; in vain he dived; again and again she overtook and dealt him the most savage blows with her sharp beak, until, her anger thoroughly appeased and the punishment completed, she swam back to the second bird, waiting quietly at the same spot for her return, and began once more diving for white stems of the _Polygonum_. Never again, we said, would the greedy young bird behave in the unmannerly way which had brought so terrible a castigation upon him! The coot is certainly a good mother who does not spoil her child by sparing the rod. And this is the bird which our comparative anatomists, after pulling it to pieces, tell us is a small-brained, unintelligent creature; and which old Michael Drayton, who, being a poet, ought to have known better, described as "a formal brainless ass"! [Sidenote: Happy families] To come back to the Itchen birds. The little group, or happy family, I have described was but one of the many groups of the same kind existing all along the river; and these separate groups, though at a distance from each other, and not exactly on visiting terms, each being jealous of its own stretch of water, yet kept up a sort of neighbourly intercourse in their own way. Single cries were heard at all times from different points; but once or two or {259} three times in the day a cry of a coot or a moor-hen would be responded to by a bird at a distance; then another would take it up at a more distant point, and another still, until cries answering cries would be heard all along the stream. At such times the voice of the skulking water-rail would be audible too, but whether this excessively secretive bird had any social relations with the others beyond joining in the general greeting and outcry I could not discover. Thus, all these separate little groups, composed of three different species, were like the members of one tribe or people broken up into families; and altogether it seemed that their lines had fallen to them in pleasant places, although it cannot be said that the placid current of their existence was never troubled.