The boat turned aside to shores where huge turtles were lying, and a stork had built her a nest, big as a hay-cock, in a withered tree, and a bevy of coots were flapping and gabbling in the weeds or between great leaves of the _Victoria Regia_--an “escape” from the Durbar Gardens. Here were, as Mandeville hath it, “all manner of strange fowle"--divers and waders, after their kind, kingfishers and snaky-necked birds of the cormorant family, but no duck. They had seen the guns in the boat and were flying to and fro in companies across the lake, or settling, wise birds, in the glare of the sun on the water. The lake was swarming with them, but they seemed to know exactly how far a twelve-bore would carry. Perhaps their knowledge had been gained from the Englishman at the Residency. Later, as the sun left the lake and the hills began to glow like opals, the boat made her way to the shallow side of the lake, through fields of watergrass and dead lotus-raffle that rose as high as the bows, and clung lovingly about the rudder, and parted with the noise of silk when it is torn. There she waited for the fall of twilight when the duck would come home to bed, and the Englishman sprawled upon the cushions in deep content and laziness, as he looked across to where two marble Palaces floated upon the waters, and saw all the glory and beauty of the City, and wondered whether Tod, in cocked hat and stiff stock, had ever come shooting among the reeds, and, if so, how in the world he had ever managed to bowl over. “Duck and drake, by Jove! Confiding beasts, weren’t they? Hi! Lalla, jump out and get them!” It was a brutal thing, this double-barrelled murder perpetrated in the silence of the marsh when the kingly wild-duck came back from his wanderings with his mate at his side, but--but--the birds were very good to eat. After this and many other slaughters had been accomplished, the boat went back in the full dusk, down narrow water-lanes and across belts of weed, disturbing innumerable fowl on the road, till she reached open water and “the moon like a rick afire was rising over the dale,” and--it was not the “whit, whit, whit” of the nightingale but the stately “_honk, honk_” of some wild geese, thanking their stars that these pestilent _shikaris_ were going away. If the Venetian owned the Pichola Sagar he might say with justice:--“See it and die.” But it is better to live and go to dinner, and strike into a new life--that of the men who bear the hat-mark on their brow as plainly as the wellborn native carries the _trisul_ of Shiva.