But all that is now changed--swept away before modern improvements; and the rare old man is gone too, and I think his only enemy also.
There was nothing I used to look forward to, as the summer waned, with so much delight as the snipe shooting.

Regularly as the swallow to the eaves in spring, the snipe comes back with the early frosts of autumn to the same well-known spots--to the bend of the brook or the boggy corner in the ploughed field--but in most uncertain numbers.

Sometimes flocks of ten or twenty, sometimes only twos and threes are seen, but always haunting particular places.
They have a special affection for peaty ground, black and spongy, where every footstep seems to squeeze water out of the soil with a slight hissing sound, and the boot cuts through the soft turf.

There, where a slow stream winds in and out, unmarked by willow or bush, but fringed with green aquatic grasses growing on a margin of ooze, the snipe finds tempting food; or in the meadows where a little spring breaks forth in the ditch and does not freeze--for water which has just bubbled out of the earth possesses this peculiarity, and is therefore favourable to low forms of insect or slug life in winter--the snipe may be found when the ponds are bound with ice.
Some of the old country folk used to make as much mystery about this bird as the cuckoo.

Because it was seldom seen till the first fogs the belief was that it had lost its way in the mist at sea, and come inland by mistake.
Just as in the early part of the year green buds and opening flowers welcome swallow and cuckoo, so the colours of the dying leaf prepare the way for the second feathered immigration in autumn.