3 86 THE HERON. 



would have secured them a dinner ; but the attempt to gain fish by 

 pouncing on it from above only tended to show them, that the old 

 beaten way in which to get a livelihood, nine times out of ten, proves 

 the most certain and the most profitable both for man and beast. 



My father was a great sportsman ; and he followed up his game 

 with an assiduity rarely witnessed in these degenerate times of long 

 lying in bed, in lieu of being in the field. In the course of his ranges, 

 he often had adventures worthy of record. But a wag, who always 

 kept his name concealed, once amused the public, at my father's 

 expense, with a story beating anything ever yet read in the annals 

 of ornithological absurdity. 



It was gravely reported that my father baited a hook attached to a 

 long line in one of his stew ponds. An eel swallowed the bait, and 

 whilst the eel was floundering in the water, a heron waded in and 

 swallowed the eel. The heron being of a lax habit of body, the eel 

 glided swiftly downwards from the stomach, and came into the world 

 again through the heron's inferior aperture. Another and another 

 heron played the same game, till at last no less than twelve herons 

 were found there, all strung together on the same line, with the eei 

 still fast to the hook in its native element, in lieu of remaining to be 

 dissolved by the gastric juice of the heron. The report added that 

 my father carried all the twelve herons home in triumph, and allowed 

 them all to rot on the line, in order that every one might inspect an 

 exhibition so interesting to natural history. This story was current, 

 and really believed, when I was a little boy ; and nobody enjoyed the 

 joke more than my father himself, for when he told it, I have seen 

 the moisture ooze out at the corners of his eyes, whilst his whole 

 frame was convulsed with laughter. 



Herons. When the weather is calm and the water warm, here, at 

 Walton Hall, the herons will alight on the deep water, and swim just 

 like water-hens. This repeatedly took place for many days in the 

 month of June of 1846. I saw the herons, after they had alighted 

 on the deep water, strike at fish, but I could not perceive that they 

 succeeded in capturing any. 



