tude spoke the watcher in the grass; then as
it stretched its neck toward me, bringing its body parallel to the ground,
how the shape of the skulker showed! This bird was not built to fly nor to
perch, but to tread the low, narrow paths of the marsh jungle, silent,
swift, and elusive as a shadow.

It was the clapper-rail, the "marsh-hen." One never finds such a
combination of long legs, long toes, long neck and bill, with this long
but heavy hen-like body, outside the meadows and marshes. The grass ought
to have been alive with the birds: it was breeding-time. But I think the
high tides must have delayed them or driven them elsewhere, for I did not
find an egg, nor hear at nightfall their colony-cry, so common at dusk and
dawn in the marshes just across on the coast about Townsend's Inlet. There
at sunset in nesting-time one of the rails will begin to call--a loud,
clapping roll; a neighbor takes it up, then another and another, the
circle of cries widening and swelling until the whole marsh is a-clatter.

Heading my way with a slow, labored stroke came one of the fish-hawks. She
was low down and some distance away, so that I got behind a post before
she saw me. The marsh-hen spied her first, and dropped into the grass. On
she came, her white breast and belly glistening, and in her talons a big
glistening fish. It was a magnificent catch. "Bravo!" I should have
shouted--rather I shouldn't; but here she was right over me, and the
instinct of the boy, of the savage, had me before I knew, and leaping out,
I whirled my cap and yelled to wake the marsh. The startled hawk jerked,
keeled, lifted with a violent struggle, and let go her hold. Down fell the
writhing, twisting fish at my feet. It was a splendid striped bass,
weighing at least four pounds, and still live enough to flop.

I felt mean as I picked up the useless thing and looked far away to the
great nest with its hungry young. I was no better than the bald eagle, the
lazy robber-baron, who had stolen the dinner of these same young hawks the
day before.

Their mother had been fishing up the river and had caught a tremendous
eel. An eel can hold out to wriggle a very long time. He has no vitals.
Even with talon-tipped claws he is slippery and more than a clawful; so
the old hawk took a short cut home across the railroad-track and the
corner of the woods where stands the eagle tree.

She could barely clear the tree-tops, and, with the squirming of the eel
about her