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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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