of not more
than a few hundred feet. The rest of his course took him far out over
the soundless spaces of the landscape, which formed an enormous bowl
rimmed by the turquoise horizon. The bowl was all a many-shaded green,
stains of the light green of birch and poplar blending with the austere
green-black of fir, cedar, and hemlock. Here and there through the dense
colour gleamed sharply the loops and coils of three watercourses and at
the centre of the bowl, glowing in the transparent brilliancy of the
northern day, shone the clear mirror of the lake. At that point of his
aerial path when the eagle swung farthest from the peak, he hung
straight over the middle of the lake and looked down into its depths.

Though no lightest breath was astir far down on the lake surface and not
a tree-top swayed in the forest, up here where the eagle was soaring
streamed a viewless and soundless wind. So it came about that at some
portions of his swing the eagle's wide, apparently moveless wings would
tilt a little, careening ever so slightly, and their tense-webbed
feathers would set themselves at a delicately different angle to the
air-current. When this took place, there would be a different note in
that strange whisper. The vibrant hiss would change to a faint, ghostly
humming, which again would fade away as the rigid feathers readjusted
themselves to another point of the gigantic curve.

Over the soaring black wings the intense sapphire of the zenith thrilled
and melted; but the eyes of the eagle were not directed upward, since
there was nothing above him but sky, and air, and the infinitude of
silence. As he swung, his gleaming, snow-white head and neck were
stretched downward toward the earth. His fierce yellow eyes, unwavering,
brilliant, and clear like crystal, deep set beneath straight,
overhanging brows, searched the far panorama with an incredibly piercing
gaze. At such a distance that the most penetrating human eye--the eye of
a sailor, a plains' ranger, a backwoods' huntsman, or an enumerator of
the stars--could not discern him in his soundless altitude, he could
mark the fall of a leaf or the scurry of a mouse in the sedge-grass.

Though the range of his marvellous vision was so vast, the eagle could
not see beneath the surfaces of the lake except when he soared straight
over it. At one point in his course the baffling reflections of the
surface vanished, and his gaze pierced to the bottom. But from all other
points the