legs, had apparently forgotten that the eagle lived along this
road, or else in her struggle to get the prize home she was risking the
old dragon's being away. He was not away. I have no doubt that he had been
watching her all the time from some high perch, and just as she reached
the open of the railroad-track, where the booty would not fall among the
trees, he appeared. His first call, mocking, threatening, commanding, shot
the poor hawk through with terror. She screamed; she tried to rise and
escape; but without a second's parley the great king drove down upon her.
She dropped the fish, dived, and dodged the blow, and the robber, with a
rushing swoop that was glorious in its sweep, in its speed and ease,
caught the eel within a wing's reach of me and the track.

I did not know what to do with my spoil. Somewhat relieved, upon looking
around, to find that even the marsh-hen had not been an eye-witness to my
knightly deed, I started with the fish and my conscience toward the
distant nest, determined to climb into it and leave the catch with the
helpless, dinnerless things for whom it was intended.

I am still carrying that fish. How seldom we are able to restore the bare
exaction, to say nothing of the fourfold! My tree was harder to climb than
Zacchaeus's. Mine was an ancient white oak, with the nest set directly upon
its dead top. I had stood within this very nest twelve years before; but
even with the help of my conscience I could not get into it now. Not that
I had grown older or larger. Twelve years do not count unless they carry
one past forty. It was the nest that had grown. Gazing up at it, I readily
believed the old farmer in the Zane's house who said it would take a pair
of mules to haul it. He thought it larger than one that blew down in the
marsh the previous winter, which made three cart-loads.

One thinks of Stirling and of the castles frowning down upon the Rhine as
he comes out of the wide, flat marsh beneath this great nest, crowning
this loftiest eminence in all the region. But no chateau of the Alps, no
beetling crag-lodged castle of the Rhine, can match the fish-hawk's nest
for sheer boldness and daring. Only the eagles' nests upon the fierce
dizzy pinnacles in the Yosemite surpass the home of the fish-hawk in
unawed boldness. The aery of the Yosemite eagle is the most sublimely
defiant of things built by bird, or beast, or man.

A fish-hawk will make its nest upon the ground, or a hummock, a stump