WILD PETS.

Hutt News, Volume 2, Issue 44, 10 April 1930, Page 4

WILD PETS.

The children had whoopingcough.- It began in the autumn, and so hung about all the winter, which happened to be rather a long and cold one.

As soon as spring came, Daddy sent them and Mother off to a farm where he used to stay before he was married, and where he knew they would be well looked after.

It was a beautiful place, and to the children, who had always lived in town, it seemed like fairyland. -■■■'."

It was miles and miles away from a railway station, almost surrounded by woods and moors, and the farmer and his wife were the kindest old couple in the world.

It seemed as if they felt they could not do. enough to make their, guests happy, and the farm hands were just as kind.

The men took the children for rides in the wagons, and the boys took them "for walk's in fields and woods where primroses and blue bells grew. Here they showed them birds' nests, with lovely speckled eggs in them, whichthe little town children thought the

most beautiful" things they had ever seen. •-•''■ ■

There was nothing they loved so much as to wander in the fields, hunting for flowers and nests, which they never disturbed, or watching the . baby rabbits that played at the edges of the woods.

Sometimes a long-legged hare would pop out of the grass almost at their- feet and dash away, and once they found two baby hares, o rleverets, so young that the chil-

dren could • pick them ap. After kissing them, they put them down again very carefully, and hiding in the hedge, watched the mother y hare crawl through the gross and join her babies.

It was a wonderfully sunny spring; birds sang all day, and at night the children listened to the nightingales- and fern-owls, and sometimes heard the grating cry of the .corn-crake as he wandered about the fields hunting for food,^ But perhaps their greatest deligHt was to lie by the big pond, and to watch the wild life that went on there.

There were reed-warblers in the reeds, and moorhens in the rushes and in- a hole under one of the steep banks a pair of kingfishers were bringing up their young.

Sometimes they would see the*

little brown bead of a water-mole "^

cutting through the water as he swam out to the lily bed; sometimes one. of the kingfishers would flit by like a flash of blue light, or plunge into the-water after some tiny fish for one of his babies.

One day, as they lay on the bank overlooking the water, they saw the mother moor-hen swim out from among the reeds, and behind hei* came four little moor-hen chicks, swimming like little black corks. .

Here and there they went, in and out among the reeds, always following the mother, whose white lined tail always showed plainly among the darkest shadows.

Day after day the children watched, till a second brood appeared, and to their surprise they noticed that the first lot, no^ half grown, helped the mother to feed and rear the new .babies.

Then came^the first "few days of June.

The kingfishers' babies were now full grown, the reed-warblers were building their beautiful cupshaped nests, and the time come for the children to go Eome.

It had been such a~ happy and healthy holiday, and they looked jl so brown and well, that Daddy^ pretended not to know them when J he came to fetch them!

''Nothing like a holiday in the country,; ' he said, "where there is always something to interest one" and home they all went, looking forward to another holiday with the kind farm folk and all the wold things.