out certainly seeing it.

The heron with which I found myself especially taken was the Louisiana;
a bird of about the same size as the little blue, but with an air of
daintiness and lightness that is quite its own, and quite indescribable.
When it rose upon the wing, indeed, it seemed almost _too_ light, almost
unsteady, as if it lacked ballast, like a butterfly. It was the most
numerous bird of its tribe along the river, I think, and, with one
exception, the most approachable. That exception was the green heron,
which frequented the flats along the village front, and might well have
been mistaken for a domesticated bird; letting you walk across a plank
directly over its head while it squatted upon the mud, and when
disturbed flying into a fig-tree before the hotel piazza, just as the
dear little ground doves were in the habit of doing. To me, who had
hitherto seen the green heron in the wildest of places, this tameness
was an astonishing sight. It would be hard to say which surprised me
more, the New Smyrna green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks,
--which latter treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treated
by village-bred robins in Massachusetts.

The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but incomparably the
handsomest member of the family (I speak of such as I saw) was the great
white egret. In truth, the epithet "handsome" seems almost a vulgarism
as applied to a creature so superb, so utterly and transcendently
splendid. I saw it--in a way to be sure of it--only once. Then, on an
island in the Hillsborough, two birds stood in the dead tops of low
shrubby trees, fully exposed in the most favorable of lights, their long
dorsal trains drooping behind them and swaying gently in the wind. I had
never seen anything so magnificent. And when I returned, two or three
hours afterward, from a jaunt up the beach to Mosquito Inlet, there they
still were, as if they had not stirred in all that time. The reader
should understand that this egret is between four and five feet in
length, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, and
that its plumage throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful to think
how constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of its
life.

Happily, the lawmakers of the State have done something of recent years
for the protection of such defenseless beauties. Happily, too, shooting
from the river boats is no longer permitted,--on the regular lines, tha