104 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



clicked behind the door. The beauty of the passage 

 quoted — the heavenward subhme 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 



