148 
A EOCK-AND-RIVER SCENE. 
heron is on the wing, and directing his course to some distant river, 
swamp, or creek. 
One of Christopher North's finest descriptions will help us now. 
Into the still twilight of many a wild rock-and-river scene, he says, 
beautiful and bewildering as the fairy work of sleep, will the naturalist 
find himself brought who knows where to seek the heron in all his 
solitary haunts. " For often, when the moors are storm-swept, and his 
bill would be bafiled by the waves of tarn and loch, he sails away from 
his swinging tree and through some open glade dipping down to the 
secluded sti'eam, alights within the calm chasm, and folds his wings in 
the breezeless air. The clouds are drivincr fast aloft in a carrv from the 
sea, but tliey are all reflected in that pellucid pool, so perfect the clifi- 
guarded repose. A better day, a better houi-, a better minute for 
fishing could not have been chosen by Mr. Heron, wlio is already 
swallowing a par. Another, and another, — but something falls from 
the rock into the water, and, suspicious though unalarmed, he leisurely 
addresses himself to a short flight up the channel, round that tower- 
like cliff" standing strangely by itself, with a crest of self-soAvn 
flowering shrubs; and lo ! another vista, if possible just a degree 
more silent, more secluded, more solitary, beneath the mid-day night 
of woods !" 
Such, indeed, is one of the favourite resorts of the lonely heron ; or 
we may think of him as retreating to a scene not unlike that which 
