THE HERON AS A TABLE -BIRD 



IN reading the Hampshire children's Bird and Tree 

 Essays for 1916 I came upon one by a little boy 

 which ends as follows: "One of our schoolboys 

 had a heron given him, so his mother cooked it 

 and when it was done it was tough and had a 



NASTY TASTE." 



Mine are the capitals, but the concluding words 

 seemed crying for them; they also served to 

 remind me of a story about eating heron told me 

 by the only person I had ever met who had some 

 first-hand knowledge about the heron as a table- 

 bird. It is a rather long story; perhaps a painful 

 one to persons of a squeamish stomach, but as it 

 is pure natural history I must be allowed to tell it. 



I was staying at Bath, and wishing to get some 

 work copied I set out with the name and address 

 of a lady typist, furnished by a bookseller of the 

 town, to look for her in the Camden Road. A long 

 road it proved. Like Pope's wounded serpent it 

 dragged its slow length along to the distant horizon 

 and beyond it. It also reminded me of Upper 

 Wigmore Street, as it seemed to poor dying Sydney 



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