m,
and one afternoon, as he was swimming aimlessly about, I saw him
suddenly dash forward, working his wings with all their might, beating
the water at every stroke, and throwing spray like a side-wheeler.
Slowly--for his body was heavy, and his wings were rather small for his
size--slowly he lifted himself from the water, all the time rushing
forward faster and faster. He couldn't have made it if he hadn't had
plenty of sea-room, but by swinging round and round in long, wide
circles he managed to rise little by little till at last he was clear of
the tree-tops. He passed right over my head as he stood away to the
south--his long neck stretched far out in front, his feet pointing
straight back beyond the end of his short tail, and his wings beating
the air with tremendous energy. How they did whizz! He made almost as
much noise as a train of cars. He laughed as he went by, and you would
have said that he was in high spirits; but before he disappeared that
lonely, long-drawn cry came back once more--"Hoo-WOOOO-ooo."

In the course of his winter wanderings through the South he happened to
alight one day on a certain wild pond down in Mississippi, and there he
found another loon--a widow whose former husband had lost his life the
previous summer under rather peculiar circumstances.

Beside a small lake in Minnesota there lives an old Dutchman who catches
fish with empty bottles. On any calm, still day you may see a lot of
them floating upright in the water, all tightly corked, and each with
the end of a fishing-line tied around its neck. They seem very decorous
and well-behaved, but let a fish take one of the hooks and begin to
pull, and immediately that particular bottle turns wrong end up, and
acts as if it had taken a drop too much of its own original contents.
Then the Dutchman paddles out in his little scow, and perhaps by the
time he has hauled in his fish and re-baited the hook another bottle is
excitedly standing on its head. But never before nor since have any of
them behaved as wildly as the one that a loon got hold of.

The loon--not Mahng, you understand, but the first husband of his new
acquaintance--had dived in search of his dinner, and the first thing he
saw that looked as if it might be good to eat was the bait on one of the
Dutchman's hooks. He swallowed it, of course, and for the next five
minutes he went charging up and down that pond at a great rate, followed
by a green glass monster with the name of