38 SYLVAN SECRETS. 



lives devoted to the one end, analysis of the 

 brook, minute observation of the minnow's 

 tricksy ways, the time to strike, in a word, 

 how to get a living on the wing. He has 

 gazed into the wavering shadowy water so 

 long that he has become habitually given to 

 a see-saw motion suggestive of vertigo in a 

 harmless form. I have lain on a favored 

 spot and looked, with half -closed eyes, far 

 down the sheeny course of a rivulet at the 

 flight of this happy knight of the fish-spear 

 as he came toward me, and I am sure there 

 is joine obscure correlation between the 

 motion of his sky-mailed wings and that of 

 the flowing water. 



Evolution tinges everything. One grows 

 like what one contemplates, and Alcyon may 

 well be said to have grown, through ages of 

 transmitted and accumulating contemplation, 

 like the swaying and lapsing water he was 

 created to love. But his voice is the very 

 irony of mirth, a derisive and soulless chuckle, 

 sounding like one long, rasping note broken 

 up into a score of rusty fragments and shaken 

 through a sieve; indeed, his vocal organs, 

 including his tongue, are rudimentary, shut- 

 ting away the possibility of song. Wilson 

 likens the cry to the sound of a watchman's 

 rattle, but it has an expression of its own, in 

 consonance with that of the babbling waves 

 and rustling acquatic plants. Stripped of its 

 entourage, it closely resembles the chattering, 

 rarer cry of the tree-frog. 



Our belted Alcyon is an expert flyer, 

 balancing himself adroitly in the air above a 

 pool or rapid, until he fixes the precise lurk- 

 ing-place of his prey, then swooping down 

 with almost electrical quickness into the water 

 to strike it. When in level flight the bird 



