rim of the East Peninsula, beyond which was the Atlantic.  The white crests of the hills made the sharper points of the horizon line.  Elsewhere clumps of nearer pine-trees intervened, while here and there a tall palmetto stood, or seemed to stand, on the highest and farthest ridge looking seaward.  But particulars mattered little.  The blue water, the pale, changeable grayish-green of the low island woods, the deeper green of the pines, the unnamable hues of the sky, the sunshine that flooded it all, these were beauty enough;—­beauty all the more keenly enjoyed because for much of the way it was seen only by glimpses, through vistas of palmetto and live-oak.  Sometimes the road came quite out of the woods, as it rounded a turn of the hammock.  Then I stopped to gaze long at the scene.  Elsewhere I pushed through the hedge at favorable points, and sat, or stood, looking up and down the river.  A favorite seat was the prow of an old row-boat, which lay, falling to pieces, high and dry upon the sand.  It had made its last cruise, but I found it still useful.

The river is shallow.  At low tide sandbars and oyster-beds occupy much of its breadth; and even when it looked full, a great blue heron would very likely be wading in the middle of it.  That was a sight to which I had grown accustomed in Florida, where this bird, familiarly known as “the major,” is apparently ubiquitous.  Too big to be easily hidden, it is also, as a general thing, too wary to be approached within gunshot.  I am not sure that I ever came within sight of one, no matter how suddenly or how far away, that it did not give evidence of having seen me first.  Long legs, long wings, a long bill—­and long sight and long patience:  such is the tall bird’s dowry.  Good and useful qualities, all of them.  Long may they avail to put off the day of their owner’s extermination.

The major is scarcely a bird of which you can make a pet in your mind, as you may of the chickadee, for instance, or the bluebird, or the hermit thrush.  He does not lend himself naturally to such imaginary endearments.  But it is pleasant to have him on one’s daily beat.  I should count it one compensation for having to live in Florida instead of in Massachusetts (but I might require a good many others) that I should see him a hundred times as often.  In walking down the river road I seldom saw less than half a dozen; not together (the major, like fishermen in general, is of an unsocial turn), but here one and there one,—­on a sand-bar far out in the river, or in some shallow bay, or on the submerged edge of an oyster-flat.  Wherever he was, he always looked as if he might be going to do something presently; even now, perhaps, the matter was on his mind; but at this moment—­well, there are times when a heron’s strength is to stand still.  Certainly he seemed in no danger of overeating.  A cracker told me that the major made an excellent dish if killed on the full of the moon.  I wondered at that qualification,