eption they were dumb. One bird, as it
dashed into the rushes, uttered two or three cries that sounded
familiar. The Florida gallinule is in general pretty silent, I think;
but he has a noisy season; then he is indeed noisy enough. A swamp
containing a single pair might be supposed to be populous with barn-yard
fowls, the fellow keeps up such a clatter: now loud and terror-stricken,
"like a hen whose head is just going to be cut off," as a friend once
expressed it; then soft and full of content, as if the aforesaid hen had
laid an egg ten minutes before, and were still felicitating herself upon
the achievement. It was vexatious that here, in the very home of Florida
gallinules, I should see and hear less of them than I had more than once
done in Massachusetts, where they are esteemed a pretty choice rarity,
and where, in spite of what I suppose must be called exceptional good
luck, my acquaintance with them had been limited to perhaps half a dozen
birds. But in affairs of this kind a direct chase is seldom the best
rewarded. At one point the boatman pulled up to a thicket of small
willows, bidding me be prepared to see birds in enormous numbers; but we
found only a small company of night herons--evidently breeding
there--and a green heron. The latter my boy shot before I knew what he
was doing. He took my reproof in good part, protesting that he had had
only a glimpse of the bird, and had taken it for a possible gallinule.
In the course of the trip we saw, besides the species already named,
great blue and little blue herons, pied-billed grebes, coots,
cormorants, a flock of small sandpipers (on the wing), buzzards,
vultures, fish-hawks, and innumerable red-winged blackbirds.

Three days afterward we went up the river. At the upper end of the lake
were many white-billed coots (_Fulica americana_); so many that we did
our best to count them as they rose, flock after flock, dragging their
feet over the water behind them with a multitudinous splashing noise.
There were a thousand, at least. They had an air of being not so very
shy, but they were nobody's fools. "See there!" my boy would exclaim, as
a hundred or two of them dashed past the boat; "see how they keep just
out of range!"

We were hardly on the river itself before he fell into a state of
something like frenzy at the sight of an otter swimming before us,
showing its head, and then diving. He made after it in hot haste, and
fired I know not how many times, but all