104 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
clicked behind the door. The beauty of the passage 
quoted—the heavenward sublime flight of the 
heron and the furious zigzag pursuit of the falcon, 
who will presently overtake and hurl it back to 
earth—is in its perfect’ naturalness, its spontaneity, 
as if some one in delight at the spectacle had 
exclaimed the words. 
This is one of the sights in bird life which makes 
me envy the sportsmen of the old time when 
falconry was followed and the peregrine was 
flown, not at skulking magpies, as the way is with 
our Hawking Club, but at noble heron. They saw 
the great bird at its best, when it mounts with 
powerful wing-beats almost vertically to a vast 
height in the sky. The heron, in these days, when 
all the hawks have been extirpated by our Philistine 
pheasant-breeders who own the country, has no 
need to exercise that instinct and faculty. 
The question has sometimes come into my 
mind, Why does the heron at all times, when, 
seen on the wing, it strikes us as beautiful, and 
when only strange or quaint-looking, or actually 
ugly, produce in some of us a feeling akin to melan- 
choly?, We speak of it as a grey, a ghost-like bird; 
and grey it certainly is, a haunter of lonely waters 
at the dim twilight hour; mysterious in its comings 
and goings. Ghostly, too, it is in another sense, 
and here we may see that the feeling, the sense of 
melancholy, is due to association, to the fact that 
the heron is a historical bird, part of the country’s 
