rom her shoulders, snowy plumes of
rare beauty._]

The Soldier watched her as she stood alone at the edge of the water, so
small and white and slender against the great cypress trees bearded with
Spanish moss, and thought she made a picture he could never forget. And
when her mate came out to her, in a white wedding-robe like her own,
with its filmy cape of mist-fine plumes, Ardea's Soldier smiled gently,
for he loved Heron Camp and shared, in his heart, the joys of their
home-coming.

Ardea and her mate took a pleasant trip, looking for a building place at
the edge of a swamp. They did not object to neighbors; which was
fortunate, as there were so many other herons in the camp that it would
have been hard to find a very secret spot for their nest. After looking
it over and talking about it a bit, they chose a mangrove bush for their
very own. They had never built a house before, but they wasted no time
in hunting for a carpenter or teacher, but went to work with a will,
just as if they knew how. It was like playing a game of "five-six, pick
up sticks"; only they did not lay them straight but in a scraggly
criss-cross sort of platform, with big twigs twelve inches long at the
bottom and smaller ones on top. Then, when it looked all ready for a
nice soft lining, Ardea laid an egg right on the rough sticks. Rather
lazy and shiftless, don't you think? or maybe they didn't know any
better, poor young things who had never had a home before! Ah, but there
was another pair of snowy herons building in the bush next door, and
they didn't put in anything soft for their eggs, either; and six or
eight bushes farther on, a little blue heron was already sitting on her
blue eggs in almost exactly the same sort of nest.

So that is the kind of carpenters herons are! Sticks laid tangled up in
a mass is the way they build! Yes, that is all--just some old dead
twigs. I mean that is all you could _see_; but never think for a minute
that there wasn't something else about that nest; for Ardea and her mate
had lined it well with love, and so it was, indeed, a home worth
building.

[Illustration: _Near Ardea's Home._]

In less than a week there were four eggs beneath the white down
comforter that Ardea tucked over them; and the little mother was as
well pleased as if she had had five, like her neighbors, the other snowy
heron and the little blue heron.

If the eggs of the little blue heron were blue, would not those of the
snowy herons