--which latter treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treated
by village-bred robins in Massachusetts.

The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but incomparably the
handsomest member of the family (I speak of such as I saw) was the great
white egret. In truth, the epithet "handsome" seems almost a vulgarism
as applied to a creature so superb, so utterly and transcendently
splendid. I saw it--in a way to be sure of it--only once. Then, on an
island in the Hillsborough, two birds stood in the dead tops of low
shrubby trees, fully exposed in the most favorable of lights, their long
dorsal trains drooping behind them and swaying gently in the wind. I had
never seen anything so magnificent. And when I returned, two or three
hours afterward, from a jaunt up the beach to Mosquito Inlet, there they
still were, as if they had not stirred in all that time. The reader
should understand that this egret is between four and five feet in
length, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, and
that its plumage throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful to think
how constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of its
life.

Happily, the lawmakers of the State have done something of recent years
for the protection of such defenseless beauties. Happily, too, shooting
from the river boats is no longer permitted,--on the regular lines, that
is. I myself saw a young gentleman stand on the deck of an excursion
steamer, with a rifle, and do his worst to kill or maim every living
thing that came in sight, from a spotted sandpiper to a turkey buzzard!
I call him a "gentleman;" he was in gentle company, and the fact that he
chewed gum industriously would, I fear, hardly invalidate his claim to
that title. The narrow river wound in and out between low, densely
wooded banks, and the beauty of the shifting scene was enough almost to