figures and huge, staring eyes of night herons.

As the last rays of the sun left the summit of the royal palms,
something like the shadow of a heron flashed out and away, and then
the import of these facts was impressed upon me. The egret, the night
heron, the vampire--here were three types of organisms, characterizing
the actions and reactions in nature. The islands were receiving and
giving up. Their heart was becoming filled with the many day-feeding
birds, and now the night-shift was leaving, and the very branch on
which a night heron might have been dozing all day was now occupied,
perhaps, by a sleeping egret. With eyes enlarged to gather together
the scanty rays of light, the night herons were slipping away in the
path of the vampires--both nocturnal, but unlike in all other ways.
And I wondered if, in the very early morning, infant night herons
would greet their returning parents; and if their callow young ever
fell into the dark waters, what awful deathly alternates would night
reveal; or were the slow-living crocodiles sleepless, with cruel eyes
which never closed so soundly but that the splash of a young night
heron brought instant response?

XI

THE BAY OF BUTTERFLIES

Butterflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my
mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts
had shifted to rocks. The ink was refractory and a vigorous flick sent
a shower of green drops over the sand on which I was sitting, and as I
watched the ink settle into the absorbent quartz--the inversions of
our grandmothers' blotters--I thought of what jolly things the lost
ink might have been made to say about butterflies and rocks, if it
could have flowed out slowly in curves and angles and dots over
paper--for the things we might have done are always so much more
worthy than those which we actually accomplish. When at last I began
to write, a song came to my ears and my mind again looped backward. At
least, there came from the very deeps of the water beyond the
mangroves a low, metallic murmur; and my Stormouth says that in
Icelandic _sangra_ means to murmur. So what is a murmur in Iceland
may very well be a song in Guiana. At any rate, my pen would have to
do only with words of singing catfish; yet from butterflies to rock,
to fish, all was logical looping--mental giant-swings which came as
relaxation after hours of observation of unrelated sheer facts.

The singing cats, so my pen conse