dropped with his musical _K'plop!_ into the shoal of
minnows that were rippling the water in their play just in front of me.
Farther out, a fishhawk came down heavily, _Souse!_ and rose with a big
chub. And none of these sharp-eyed wood folk saw me or knew that they
were watched. Then a wide, wavy, blue line, like a great Cupid's bow,
came gliding swiftly along the opposite bank of green, and Quoskh hove
into sight for his morning's fishing.

Opposite me, just where the buck had stood, he folded his great wings;
his neck crooked sharply; his long legs, which had been trailed
gracefully behind him in his swift flight, swung under him like two
pendulums as he landed lightly on the muddy shore. He knew his ground
perfectly; knew every stream and frog-haunted bay in the pond as one
knows his own village; yet no amount of familiarity with his
surroundings can ever sing lullaby to Quoskh's watchfulness. The instant
he landed he drew himself up straight, standing almost as tall as a man,
and let his keen glance run along every shore just once. His head, with
its bright yellow eye and long yellow beak glistening in the morning
light, veered and swung over his long neck like a gilded weather-vane on
a steeple. As the vane swung up the shore toward me I held my breath, so
as to be perfectly motionless, thinking I was hidden so well that no eye
could find me at that distance. As it swung past me slowly I chuckled,
thinking that Quoskh was deceived. I forgot altogether that a bird never
sees straight ahead. When his bill had moved some thirty degrees off my
nose, just enough so as to bring his left eye to bear, it stopped
swinging instantly.--He had seen me at the first glance, and knew that I
did not belong there.

For a long moment, while his keen eye seemed to look through and through
me, he never moved a muscle. One could easily have passed over him,
thinking him only one of the gray, wave-washed roots on the shore. Then
he humped himself together, in that indescribably awkward way that all
herons have at the beginning of their flight, slanted heavily up to the
highest tree on the shore, and stopped for a longer period on a dead
branch to look back at me. I had not moved so much as an eyelid;
nevertheless he saw me too plainly to trust me. Again he humped himself,
rose high over the tree-tops and bore away in strong, even, graceful
flight for a lonelier lake, where there was no man to watch or bother
him.

Far from disappoi