, a
buoy, a chimney--upon anything near the water that offers an adequate
platform; but its choice is the dead top of some lofty tree where the
pathway for its wide wings is open and the vision range is free for miles
around.

How dare the bird rear such a pile upon so slight and towering a support!
How dare she defy the winds, which, loosened far out on the bay, come
driving across the cowering, unresisting marsh! She is too bold sometimes.
I have known more than one nest to fall in a wild May gale. Many a nest,
built higher and wider year after year, while all the time its dead
support has been rotting and weakening, gets heavy with the wet of winter,
and some night, under the weight of an ice-storm, comes crashing to the
earth.

Yet twelve years had gone since I scaled the walls and stood within this
nest; and with patience and hardihood enough I could have done it again
this time, no doubt. I remember one nest along Maurice River, perched so
high above the gums of the swamp as to be visible from my home across a
mile of trees, that has stood a landmark for the oystermen this score of
years.

The sensations of my climb into this fish-hawk's nest of the marsh are
vivid even now. Going up was comparatively easy. When I reached the forks
holding the nest, I found I was under a bulk of sticks and corn-stalks
which was about the size of an ordinary haycock or an unusually large
wash-tub. By pulling out, pushing aside, and breaking off the sticks, I
worked a precarious way through the four feet or more of debris and
scrambled over the edge. There were two eggs. Taking them in my hands, so
as not to crush them, I rose carefully to my feet.

Upright in a hawk's nest! Sixty feet in the air, on the top of a gaunt old
white oak, high above the highest leaf, with the screaming hawks about my
head, with marsh and river and bay lying far around! It was a moment of
exultation; and the thrill of it has been transmitted through the years.
My body has been drawn to higher places since; but my soul has never
quite touched that altitude again, for I was a boy then.

Nor has it ever shot swifter, deeper into the abyss of mortal terror than
followed with my turning to descend. I looked down into empty air. Feet
foremost I backed over the rim, clutching the loose sticks and feeling for
a foothold. They snapped with the least pressure; slipped and fell if I
pushed them, or stuck out into my clothing. Suddenly the sticks in my
hands pu