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 
