A TROPIC GARDEN 245 



fectual attempts at pecking one another, or else 

 hunched in silent heron-dream. They were 

 scarcely more alive than the creeping, hour-hand 

 tendrils about them, mere double-stemmed, fluffy 

 petaled blossoms, no more strange than the near- 

 est vegetable blooms — the cannon-ball mystery, 

 the sand-box puzzle, sinister orchids, and the 

 false color-alarms of the white-bracted silver- 

 leaf. Compared with these, perching herons are 

 right and seemly fruit. 



As I watched them I suddenly stiffened in 

 sympathy, as I saw all vegetable sloth drop away 

 and each bird become a detached individual, 

 plucked by an electric emotion from the appear- 

 ance of a thing of sap and fiber to a vital being 

 of tingling nerves. I followed their united 

 glance, and overhead there vibrated, lightly as a 

 thistledown, the first incoming adult heron, 

 swinging in from a day's fishing along the coast. 

 It went on and vanished among the fronds of a 

 distant island; but the calm had been broken, 

 and through all the stems there ran a restless 

 sense of anticipation, a Zeitgeist of prophetic im- 

 port. One felt that memory of past things was 

 dimming, and content with present comfort was 

 no longer dominant. It was the future to which 



