earments. But it is pleasant to have him on one's daily beat. I
should count it one compensation for having to live in Florida instead
of in Massachusetts (but I might require a good many others) that I
should see him a hundred times as often. In walking down the river road
I seldom saw less than half a dozen; not together (the major, like
fishermen in general, is of an unsocial turn), but here one and there
one,--on a sand-bar far out in the river, or in some shallow bay, or on
the submerged edge of an oyster-flat. Wherever he was, he always looked
as if he might be going to do something presently; even now, perhaps,
the matter was on his mind; but at this moment--well, there are times
when a heron's strength is to stand still. Certainly he seemed in no
danger of overeating. A cracker told me that the major made an excellent
dish if killed on the full of the moon. I wondered at that
qualification, but my informant explained himself. The bird, he said,
feeds mostly at night, and fares best with the moon to help him. If the
reader would dine off roast blue heron, therefore, as I hope I never
shall, let him mind the lunar phases. But think of the gastronomic ups
and downs of a bird that is fat and lean by turns twelve times a year!
Possibly my informant overstated the case; but in any event I would
trust the major to bear himself like a philosopher. If there is any one
of God's creatures that can wait for what he wants, it must be the great
blue heron.

I have spoken of his caution. If he was patrolling a shallow on one side
of an oyster-bar,--at the rate, let us say, of two steps a minute,--and
took it into his head (an inappropriate phrase, as conveying an idea of
something like suddenness) to try the water on the other side, he did
not spread his wings, as a matter of course, and fly over. First he put
up his head--an operation that makes another bird of him--and looked in
all directions. How could he tell what enemy might be lying in wait? And
having alighted on the other side (his manner of alighting is one of his
prettiest characteristics), he did not at once draw in his neck till his
bill protruded on a level with his body, and resume his labors, but
first he looked once more all about him. It was a good _habit_ to do
that, anyhow, and he meant to run no risks. If "the race of birds was
created out of innocent, light-minded men, whose thoughts were directed
toward heaven," according to the word of Plato, then _Ardea