efuge in the wild
bosky moor-land back of Hole Common. Here, on the edge of the copse, the
river widens to a considerable pool, and coming upon it softly through
the wood from behind--the boggy, moss-covered ground masking and
muffling my foot-fall--I have surprised a great, graceful ash-and-white
heron, standing all unconscious on the shallow bottom, in the very act
of angling for minnows. The heron is a somewhat rare bird among the more
cultivated parts of England; but just hereabouts we get a sight of one
not infrequently, for they still breed in a few tall ash-trees at
Chilcombe Park, where the lords of the manor in mediaeval times long
preserved a regular heronry to provide sport for their hawking. There is
no English bird, not even the swan, so perfectly and absolutely graceful
as the heron. I am leaning now breathless and noiseless against the
gate, taking a good look at him, as he stands half-knee deep on the oozy
bottom, with his long neck arched over the water, and his keen purple
eye fixed eagerly upon the fish below. Though I am still twenty yards
from where he poises lightly on his stilted legs, I can see distinctly
his long pendent snow-white breast-feathers, his crest of waving black
plumes, falling loosely backward over the ash-gray neck, and even the
bright red skin of his bare legs just below the feathered thighs. I dare
hardly move nearer to get a closer view of his beautiful plumage; and
still I will try. I push very quietly through the gate, but not quite
quietly enough for the heron. One moment he raises his curved neck and
poises his head a little on one side to listen for the direction of the
rustling; then he catches a glimpse of me as I try to draw back silently
behind a clump of flags and nettles; and in a moment his long legs give
him a good spring from the bottom, his big wings spread with a sudden
flap sky-wards, and almost before I can note what is happening he is off
and away to leeward, making a bee-line for the high trees that fringe
the artificial water in Chilcombe Hollow.

All these wading birds the herons, the cranes, the bitterns, the snipes,
and the plovers are almost necessarily, by the very nature of their
typical conformation, beautiful and graceful in form. Their tall,
slender legs, which they require for wading, their comparatively light
and well-poised bodies, their long, curved, quickly-darting necks and
sharp beaks, which they need in order to secure their rapid-swimming
p