FROZEN POND
When I visited it, the pond was frozen, and the ice was covered with a confectioner's dust- ing of snow. I stood and looked around for a while, admiring the glitter of sunlight on the ice. The picture held more than beauty. On the bank a dog or a fox had tarried for a while and quite plainly a bullock had blundered down and stood with all four feet in the shallow water before swinging round and going out again, plodding through the harden- ing mud. The ice wouldn't take my weight any better than it had taken that of the bullock, but it had carried a large number of different sorts of birds. One of them, I decided, had been a heron. They arc lean days for the heron when fish arc lying in the deeps and streams and ponds freeze over. Even a walking skele- ton of a bird like a heron needs something to eat on a cold day, but it was very probable that the heron had flapped away from the pond with not even a morsel.
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