just about to circle, on one of those narrow raised causeways on 
which so much travelling in China is done, with barely room for 
one man’s feet, a mud swamp on either side for the rice to grow 
in or to receive you if you step unwarily, as always must happen 
sooner or later with every man — there we saw one heron, and 
then another, and another, till at last the whole irregular scalene 
triangle we knew so well, without a base, but with outflanking 
guards on either side of where the base should have been, rose 
slowly, with long legs sticking out behind as a rudder, and 
beautiful white wings wide dis-spread, and set out with an easy, 
assured stroke for the city where we dwelt, and their home among 
the trees on the other side of the great river, and some three or four 
miles further down. They were the very same herons we had so 
often watched, and now, as by a chance, we had discovered their 
feeding-ground, though why they should choose rice-fields so 
very far from their roosting-place or a roosting-place so very far 
from their feeding-ground puzzled us. Not so our Chinese coolies. 
To them the matter was quite simple. The birds were accus¬ 
tomed to the trees, and always lived there all the year round. 
Now at this season of the year the rice where we then were was 
just the right cover for the insects that formed their food; at 
another season of the year it would be another place. The birds 
knew where to find their food at all the different seasons in the 
great circle, over which they could fly easily, of about twenty 
miles—as herons fly—from their home, the sacred grove. And 
in all their flights to and fro no man harmed them. Herons are 
not good for food, but they are what the Chinese call good to 
see. So the blue-gowned peasants looked at them, and talked of 
them in that soft Chinese that country people use of anything 
they love much, such as Tu-ti, the tutelary Deity of heaven and 
earth, or Di-di, baby, or the like. Painters painted them, from 
memory mostly, but their memories are good ; poets used them 
for their similes. And no man nor boy in China harmed the 
herons. 
But to make a sad story short. Bewick says the pretty creatures 
had been well-nigh exterminated in England even in his day, 
and since then the supply of egrets’ crests has well-nigh given 
out in South America, whilst the demand for aigrettes is greater 
than ever; so one day my husband received a letter from an 
