The common is rough and untidy, with clumps of gorse and thistles and nettles. There is usually a spotty pony chewing the grass, and a goat with naughty looking horns and a grey beard. A tiny donkey with an enormous voice is tethered to a stake in the ground. There is a crowd of geese, who throw out their long necks in vicious curves, and hiss at strangers and sometimes frighten them. They do not hiss at us. Perhaps they know that we would not be very frightened if they did. The Elf likes this last part of the walk, because she loves to imagine she is a goosegirl in a fairy tale, who drives geese, until she meets a noble Prince, who finds out that really she is a Princess all the time. Some days the Imp is quite ready to pretend to be the Prince, and act the whole story. But other days he is in a precious hurry to get to the pond, and the poor Elf has to be a goosegirl without a Prince, and that is a poor business. She soon tires of it, and runs after us across the common. Long before we reach the pond, we hear the quaack, quaack of the ducks, and see them waddling along with their bodies very near the ground by the muddy edges of the water, flopping hurriedly first on one leg and then on the other. When we get near them we can see that as they lift their feet they turn their toes in in a manner that shows they have not been at all properly brought up. But then without warning they throw themselves forward along the water, and swim, looking, suddenly, quite graceful. Everything looks quite graceful in its proper place, and almost everything looks silly when it is anywhere else. Even swans, who are the most beautiful of all birds in the water, look as ungainly as can be when they walk along the ground. And if you put a fish, who swims beautifully in the pool, out on the dry land, he just flops and dies, and that is not a pretty sight at all. The duck pond is very big and round. One bank of it is covered with dark trees that overhang and make green pictures of themselves in the water when the wind is still. And partly under the trees, and partly at one side of them, the bank is high and over-hanging and sandy, and in the sand there are little holes where the sandmartins have their nests. The sandmartins are rather like swallows, only instead of building clay nests under the roof edges of a house, they bore holes with their beaks in banks of earth, and make their nests inside them. A very, very long time ago, we used to do just like them, burrowing into the ground, making a passage with a cave at the end of it, and living there under the earth. There are some of these old homes of ours still left in some parts of the country. The Imp and the Elf are fond of the sandmartins, because they are always in a hurry like themselves. It is fine to see them fly swift and low over the pond, and flutter at the mouth of the hole, and then vanish into it, like mice into a crevice in the wall.