Near the major—­not keeping him company, but feeding in the same shallows and along the same oyster-bars—­were constantly to be seen two smaller relatives of his, the little blue heron and the Louisiana.  The former is what is called a dichromatic species; some of the birds are blue, and others white.  On the Hillsborough, it seemed to me that white specimens predominated; but possibly that was because they were so much more conspicuous.  Sunlight favors the white feather; no other color shows so quickly or so far.  If you are on the beach and catch sight of a bird far out at sea,—­a gull or a tern, a gannet or a loon,—­it is invariably the white parts that are seen first.  And so the little white heron might stand never so closely against the grass or the bushes on the further shore of the river, and the eye could not miss him.  If he had been a blue one, at that distance, ten to one he would have escaped me.  Besides, I was more on the alert for white ones, because I was always hoping to find one of them with black legs.  In other words, I was looking for the little white egret, a bird concerning which, thanks to the murderous work of plume-hunters,—­thanks, also, to those good women who pay for having the work done,—­I must confess that I went to Florida and came home again without certainly seeing it.

The heron with which I found myself especially taken was the Louisiana; a bird of about the same size as the little blue, but with an air of daintiness and lightness that is quite its own, and quite indescribable.  When it rose upon the wing, indeed, it seemed almost too light, almost unsteady, as if it lacked ballast, like a butterfly.  It was the most numerous bird of its tribe along the river, I think, and, with one exception, the most approachable.  That exception was the green heron, which frequented the flats along the village front, and might well have been mistaken for a domesticated bird; letting you walk across a plank directly over its head while it squatted upon the mud, and when disturbed flying into a fig-tree before the hotel piazza, just as the dear little ground doves were in the habit of doing.  To me, who had hitherto seen the green heron in the wildest of places, this tameness was an astonishing sight.  It would be hard to say which surprised me more, the New Smyrna green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks, —­which latter treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treated by village-bred robins in Massachusetts.

The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but incomparably the handsomest member of the family (I speak of such as I saw) was the great white egret.  In truth, the epithet “handsome” seems almost a vulgarism as applied to a creature so superb, so utterly and transcendently splendid.  I saw it—­in a way to be sure of it—­only once.  Then, on an island in the Hillsborough, two birds stood in the dead tops of low shrubby trees, fully exposed in the most favorable of lights, their