Suddenly there was a roar of multitudinous wings as a host of redwings upburst from springing and swaying wild rice stalks, all of which I saw through the blackness illumined for an instant by memory,--the dusky cloud uprising like the smoke of an explosion, the bent rice springing up beneath its lifted burden, the dull-witted or greedy laggards dribbling upward to join the majority. My companions exclaimed in one voice at the rare sight of a white bird in the flock, and by the same light of memory I also saw it as I saw one in an autumn forty years ago, when, with my comrade of those days, I came "daown the crik" duck-shooting, or trolling as to-day. Again and again we saw this phenomenal bird like a white star twinkling through a murky cloud. The fitful gleam was seen day after day, till the north wind blew him and his cloud away southward. The pother of the blackbirds overhead disturbed the meditations of a bittern, who, with an alarmed croak, jerked his ungainly form aloft in a flurry of awkward wing-beats, and went sagging across the marshes in search of safer seclusion. I wished that he might find it, and escape the ruthless gunners that will presently come to desolate these marshes. Very different from his uprising was that of a pair of wood ducks, revealing their unsuspected presence with startling suddenness, as they sprang from water to air with a splash and whistle of rapid wings and their squeaking alarm cry, and then flew swiftly away, the sibilant wing-beats pulsing out in the distance. These, too, I wished might safely run the gauntlet of all the guns that will be arrayed against them when the summer truce is broken. If I had not been mustered out, or if my boy were mustered in, no doubt I should feel differently toward the inhabitants of these marshes. Compulsory abstinence makes one exceedingly virtuous, and because I am virtuous there shall be no cakes and ale for any one. The absence of the rail's cackle was noticeable, a clamor that used to be provoked at this season by every sudden noise. We never got sight of the "ma'sh chickens" as they skulked among the sedges; and when the birds were pressed to flight, rarely caught more than a fleeting glimpse as they topped the rushes for an instant, and dropped again into the mazes of the marsh. But they were always announcing a numerous if invisible presence where now not one answered to our voices or the noise of our oars.