CEBYLE ALCYON. 45 



one morning on the Salliquoy, just as the ar- 

 cher saw a three-pound bass he was playing 

 leap out of the water and shake itself free of 

 the hook. ' ' Pid-d-d-d-d-d ! " It was the most 

 inopportune jeer imaginable to the ear of the 

 baffled angler. Down went the rod along 

 with some classical allusion to hades, and up 

 came the bow and arrow from the bottom of 

 the pirogue. The archer had a most becom- 

 ing phrensy in his visage as he poised him- 

 self and drew the arrow almost into the bow, 



Alcyon sat on a dogwood branch, amid the 

 clusters of great white flowers, distant sixty 

 yards from the bowman. 



There was a tragic pause for the aim, a 

 knotting of the muscles on the straining 

 arms, then the recoil of the bow, the low sibi- 

 lation of the missile. I watched with atten- 

 tive eyes, throughout the flat trafectory, the 

 flight of the feathered shaft. 



"Take that, you snickering idiot!" ex- 

 claimed the irate archer, just as he thought 

 the arrow would strike. 



"Pid-d-d-d-d-d!" retorted Alcyon, taking 

 to wing just in time to give his space to the 

 shaft, and away he went down the winding 

 course of the stream until he was lost in the 

 gloom and sheen of distance. A spray of 

 dogwood blooms, severed by the shot, fell up- 

 on the water, and then the " tchick " of the 

 arrow-head, striking among the pebbles of a 

 shallow "riffle" far down the stream, came 

 back like an echo of the bird's final note, to 

 make the archer's defeat most emphatic. 



The semi-comical grotesquerie of the king- 

 fisher's ways is exemplified in his attitude 

 while suspending himself in the air above the 

 water by a peculiar alar motion, when his 

 head is thrust forward and downward to the 



