Holiday Papers Author:Harry Jones Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DABCHICKS. ROPERLY, I ought not to call them dabchicks—not at least in capitals, and at the head of my paper—for the true distinctive English name of the... more » bird is "The Little Grebe." But "dabchick" is so happily expressive of the habits and appearance of the animal, that it recalls in a moment its nervous jerky motion on the water, and its sudden disappearance with a "flip," as if, instead of diving, it had unexpectedly jumped down its own throat. Oh! those long spring summer days, when I lay in my punt among the rushes of the mere, and watched the manifold incessant business of its watery world. The mere, so called, of my youth, and which my brother and I stocked when we were little boys, was a pond of about ten acres, swarming with life above and below its surface. It lay about 200 yards from our house, and, with gently sloping green banks, was skirted on the further side by an irregular belt of trees, among some of whose trunks the60 The Punt. water rose when the mere was full. My brother and I had built (with considerable assistance, it must be confessed, from the village carpenter) a punt, after the recipe given in Colonel Hawker's book on shooting. We built it in the coach-house, and when it had been carried down to the brink, in, or rather on, a tumbril, we watched its launch, and gloried in its capabilities with an interest worthy of the " Warrior." A great portion of my subsequent holiday life I spent in that punt, and baled out of it, in turn, I was going to say, half the water in the pond. Like most things which are in the main a success, it had its weak points, and one was an occasional trick of leaking. Moreover, it was a bad sailer; being quite flat- bottomed, however close-hauled and with the helm jammed hard down, it invariably moved before the wind, like...« less