every town and
city of the land. Another year, and we often found ourselves--alone--or
with one chosen comrade; for even then we began to have our sympathies
and antipathies, not only with roses and lilies, or to cats and cheese,
but with or to the eyes, and looks, and foreheads, and hair, and voices,
and motions, and silence, and rest of human beings, loving them with a
perfect love--we must not say hating them with a perfect hatred--alone
or with a friend, among the mists and marshes of moors, in silent and
stealthy search of the solitary curlew, that is, the Whaup! At first
sight of his long bill aloft above the rushes, we could hear our heart
beating quick time in the desert; at the turning of his neck, the body
being yet still, our heart ceased to beat altogether--and we grew sick
with hope when near enough to see the wild beauty of his eye. Unfolded,
like a thought, was then the brown silence of the shy creature's ample
wings--and with a warning cry he wheeled away upon the wind, unharmed by
our ineffectual hail, seen falling far short of the deceptive distance,
while his mate that had lain couched--perhaps in her nest of eggs or
young, exposed yet hidden--within killing range, half-running,
half-flying, flapped herself into flight, simulating lame leg and
wounded wing; and the two disappearing together behind the hills, left
us in our vain reason thwarted by instinct, to resume with live hopes
rising out of the ashes of the dead, our daily disappointed quest over
the houseless mosses. Yet now and then to our steady aim the bill of the
whaup disgorged blood--and as we felt the feathers in our hand, and from
tip to tip eyed the outstretched wings, Fortune, we felt, had no better
boon to bestow, earth no greater triumph.

Hush--stoop--kneel--crawl--for by all our hopes of mercy--a heron--a
heron! An eel dangling across his bill! And now the water-serpent has
disappeared! From morning dawn hath the fowl been fishing here--perhaps
on that very stone--for it is one of those days when eels are a-roaming
in the shallows, and the heron knows that they are as likely to pass by
that stone as any other--from morning dawn--and 'tis now past meridian,
half-past two! Be propitious, oh ye Fates! and never--never--shall he
again fold his wings on the edge of his gaping nest, on the trees that
overtop the only tower left of the old castle. Another eel! and we too
can crawl silent as the sinuous serpent. Flash! Bang! over he goes
d