ead--no, not dead--but how unlike that unavailing flapping, as
head-over-heels he goes spinning over the tarn, to the serene unsettling
of himself from sod or stone, when, his hunger sated, and his craw
filled with fish for his far-off brood, he used to lift his blue bulk
into the air, and with long depending legs, at first floated away like a
wearied thing, but soon, as his plumes felt the current of air homewards
flowing, urged swifter and swifter his easy course--laggard and lazy no
more--leaving leagues behind him, ere you had shifted your motion in
watching his cloudlike career, soon invisible among the woods!

The disgorged eels are returned--some of them alive--to their native
element--the mud. And the dead heron floats away before small winds and
waves into the middle of the tarn. Where is he--the matchless
Newfoundlander--_nomine gaudens_ FRO, because white as the froth of the
sea? Off with a collie. So--stript with the first intention, we plunge
from a rock, and,

"Though in the scowl of heaven, the tarn
Grows dark as we are swimming,"

Draco-like, breast-high, we stem the surge, and with the heron floating
before us, return to the heather-fringed shore, and give three cheers
that startle the echoes, asleep from year's end to year's end, in the
Grey-Linn Cairn.

Into the silent twilight of many a wild rock-and-river scene, beautiful
and bewildering as the fairy work of sleep, will he find himself brought
who knows where to seek the heron in all its solitary haunts. For often
when the moors are storm-swept, and his bill would be baffled by the
waves of tarn and loch, he sails away from his swinging-tree, and
through some open glade dipping down to the secluded stream, alights
within the calm chasm, and folds his wings in the breezeless air. The
clouds are driving fast aloft in a carry from the sea--but they are all
reflected in that pellucid pool--so perfect the cliff-guarded repose. A
better day--a better hour--a better minute for fishing could not have
been chosen by Mr Heron, who is already swallowing a par. Another--and
another--but something falls from the rock into the water; and
suspicious, though unalarmed, he leisurely addresses himself to a short
flight up the channel--round that tower-like cliff standing strangely by
itself, with a crest of self-sown flowering shrubs; and lo! another
vista, if possible, just a degree more silent--more secluded--more
solitary--beneath the mid-day night of