28 
WILD WINGS 
The wind now began to fail us still more, and at dusk, 
when four miles from our destination, it was flat calm. Here 
we anchored, and the guide rowed ashore to his home, intend¬ 
ing to return early in the morning. 
Some time in the wee, small hours, when it was yet very 
dark, one of the men, sleeping on deck, awoke, and, deciding 
that something was wrong, aroused the company. Sure 
enough, the wind had arisen strong from the northwest and 
we were adrift, evidently well out in Florida Bay. We could 
just make out two keys under our lee. The anchor had 
become fouled and was dragging. When cleared, it held us, 
just as the vessel began to ground in the mud. At daybreak 
we got up jib and mainsail, all the sail we could carry in the 
brisk wind, and beat in toward a point on the distant shore 
where the glasses revealed a couple of buildings, which 
proved to be our destination, where we were to make head¬ 
quarters. 
We remained here a week, making trips into the interior, 
and to neighboring keys. Several of the latter, three miles 
off shore, we visited in a small boat, and here it was that 
I first made real acquaintance with the Great White Heron, 
a splendid snow-white creature that stands well-nigh as tall 
as a man, measuring about seventy inches from bill to claws. 
A])proaching one of these rather small keys, I saw several of 
the noble birds flying uneasilv about over the trees, and, 
clambering about for a time amid mangrove roots and slip- 
perv mud, never ceasing to fight mosquitoes withal, I was 
rewarded by coming to a spot where, in some particularly 
large trees, several nests of the Great White Heron were 
built. They were placed in crotches, twenty to thirty feet 
from the ground — bulkv, wide platforms of sticks, saucer¬ 
shaped, profusely whitewashed, and each with two or three 
snowy white young, in size and age from only a few days 
