182 IN BIRD LAND. 
cast — not jewels by any means — in the nest. On 
my second visit four of the oddest birdlings I ever 
looked upon greeted me with wide-open eyes and 
mouths. ‘They were covered with light yellowish 
down, and the space about the eyes was of a 
greenish hue, — one of the characteristic markings 
of the adult birds. When they opened their mouths, 
expecting to be fed, their throats puffed out some- 
what like the throats of croaking frogs, making a 
good-sized pocket inside to receive chunks of food. 
The thought struck me that perhaps the pocket was 
designed as a sort of temporary storage place for 
victuals until the nestling was ready to swallow them. 
The birds made a low, quaint noise that cannot be 
represented phonetically. Indeed, the picture they 
made was slightly uncanny, so I did not linger about 
it overlong. 
A week later my third and last call on the heron 
household was made. What an odd spectacle it 
presented! The young birds had grown wonder- 
fully, though still covered with down, with very little 
sign of feathers. As my head appeared above the 
rim of the nest, they slowly craned up their India- 
rubber necks, then rose on their stilt-like legs, and 
looked at me with wondering, wide-open eyes that 
gleamed almost like gold. ‘The spectacle made me 
think of ghouls, incongruous as the simile may seem. 
When I touched one of the birds, it huddled, 
half-alarmed, down to the bottom of the nest. An- 
other slyly stalked off to the edge of the platform, 
upon a thick clump of twigs and leaves, eying me 
