MR.

MARSTON'S NARROW ESCAPE.
The wintry weather passed away with its storms and continuous rains and floods, which hindered the progress of the great lode or drain, and then came the spring sunshine, with the lads waking up to the fact that here and there the arums were thrusting up their glossy-green spathes, that the celandines were out like yellow stars, and that the rustling reeds left uncut had been snapped off and beaten down, and had rotted in the water, and that from among them the young shoots of the fresh crop were beginning to peep.
Bold brisk winds swept over the fen and raised foamy waves in the meres, and the nights were clear and cold, though there had been little frost that year, never enough to well coat the lakes and pools with ice, so that the pattens could be cleaned from their rust and sharpened at Hickathrift's grindstone ready for the lads at the old Priory and Grimsey to skate in and out for miles.

But, in spite of the cold, there was a feeling of spring in the air.

The great grey-backed crows were getting scarce, and the short-eared owls, which, a couple of months before, could be flushed from the tufts in the fen, to fly off looking like chubby hawks, were gone, and the flights of ducks and peewits had broken up.

The golden plovers were gone; but the green peewits were busy nesting, or rather laying eggs without nests--pear-shaped eggs, small at one end, large at the other, thickly blotched and splashed with dark green, and over which the birds watched, ready to fall as if with broken wing before the intruder, and try to lure him away.
Many a tramp over the sodden ground did the lads have with Dave, who generally waited for their coming, leaping-pole in hand, and then took them to the peewits' haunts to gather a basketful of their eggs.
"I don't know how you do it, Dave," said Dick.