having a rather hard time of
it, and with islands and lily-pads as havens, and waterways in every
direction, Rikki is reduced chiefly to grasshoppers and such small
game. He has spread along the entire coast, through the cane-fields
and around the rice-swamps, and it will not be his fault if he does
not eventually get a foothold in the jungle itself.

No month or day or hour fails to bring vital changes--tragedies and
comedies--to the network of life of these tropical gardens; but as we
drive along the broad paths of an afternoon, the quiet vistas show
only waving palms, weaving vultures, and swooping kiskadees, with
bursts of color from bougainvillea, flamboyant, and queen of the
flowers. At certain times, however, the tide of visible change swelled
into a veritable bore of life, gently and gradually, as quiet waters
become troubled and then pass into the seething uproar of rapids. In
late afternoon, when the long shadows of palms stretched their
blue-black bars across the terra-cotta roads, the foliage of the green
bamboo islands was dotted here and there with a scattering of young
herons, white and blue and parti-colored. Idly watching them through
glasses, I saw them sleepily preening their sprouting feathers, making
ineffectual attempts at pecking one another, or else hunched in
silent heron-dream. They were scarcely more alive than the creeping,
hour-hand tendrils about them, mere double-stemmed, fluffy petaled
blossoms, no more strange than the nearest vegetable blooms--the
cannon-ball mystery, the sand-box puzzle, sinister orchids, and the
false color-alarms of the white-bracted silver-leaf. Compared with
these, perching herons are right and seemly fruit.

As I watched them I suddenly stiffened in sympathy, as I saw all
vegetable sloth drop away and each bird become a detached individual,
plucked by an electric emotion from the appearance of a thing of sap
and fiber to a vital being of tingling nerves. I followed their united
glance, and overhead there vibrated, lightly as a thistledown, the
first incoming adult heron, swinging in from a day's fishing along the
coast. It went on and vanished among the fronds of a distant island;
but the calm had been broken, and through all the stems there ran a
restless sense of anticipation, a zeitgeist of prophetic import. One
felt that memory of past things was dimming, and content with present
comfort was no longer dominant. It was the future to which both the
baby herons