CHAPTER VIII 



FEATHERED TOURISTS 



WHEN you look for things and hope for 

 things and greatly desire things year after 

 year, and train your senses to continue their con- 

 centration after the less important parts of you are 

 sleeping or eating or playing or merely talking, 

 then sooner or later, very special things happen 

 within sight or hearing, smell or touch, radius. I 

 have been lucky, for a queen termite once began her 

 miraculous city at the very moment I was crossing 

 my compound; giant fruit-bats have crossed the 

 surface of the moon just as I focused glasses on it; 

 a Sclater's impeyan pheasant reached the summit 

 of a bamboo hill in northern Burma as I crept up 

 the opposite slope; shooting stars seem often to 

 hang back in obscurity until I am looking at their 

 exact future path, and I have missed more than one 

 important lob at tennis because a rare migrant drew 

 my eye to the sky beyond. 



For two days a single greater yellow-legs had 

 lived on South Beach, Nonsuch, feeding, sleeping 

 and chumming with a band of turnstones and bene- 

 fiting by their football rushes against the loose 

 clumps of stranded sargassum. The third day, 

 August 9th, 1931, most of me was deep in the char- 



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