long dorsal trains drooping behind them and swaying gently in the wind.  I had never seen anything so magnificent.  And when I returned, two or three hours afterward, from a jaunt up the beach to Mosquito Inlet, there they still were, as if they had not stirred in all that time.  The reader should understand that this egret is between four and five feet in length, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, and that its plumage throughout is of spotless white.  It is pitiful to think how constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of its life.

Happily, the lawmakers of the State have done something of recent years for the protection of such defenseless beauties.  Happily, too, shooting from the river boats is no longer permitted,—­on the regular lines, that is.  I myself saw a young gentleman stand on the deck of an excursion steamer, with a rifle, and do his worst to kill or maim every living thing that came in sight, from a spotted sandpiper to a turkey buzzard!  I call him a “gentleman;” he was in gentle company, and the fact that he chewed gum industriously would, I fear, hardly invalidate his claim to that title.  The narrow river wound in and out between low, densely wooded banks, and the beauty of the shifting scene was enough almost to take one’s breath away; but the crack of the rifle was not the less frequent on that account.  Perhaps the sportsman was a Southerner, to whom river scenery of that enchanting kind was an old story.  More likely he was a Northerner, one of the men who thank Heaven they are “not sentimental.”

In my rambles up and down the river road I saw few water birds beside the herons.  Two or three solitary cormorants would be shooting back and forth at a furious rate, or swimming in midstream; and sometimes a few spotted sandpipers and killdeer plovers were feeding along the shore.  Once in a great while a single gull or tern made its appearance,—­just often enough to keep me wondering why they were not there oftener,—­and one day a water turkey went suddenly over my head and dropped into the river on the farther side of the island.  I was glad to see this interesting creature for once in salt water; for the Hillsborough, like the Halifax and the Indian rivers, is a river in name only,—­a river by brevet,—­being, in fact, a salt-water lagoon or sound between the mainland and the eastern peninsula.

Fish-hawks were always in sight, and bald eagles were seldom absent altogether.  Sometimes an eagle stood perched on a dead tree on an island.  Oftener I heard a scream, and looked up to see one sailing far overhead, or chasing an osprey.  On one such occasion, when the hawk seemed to be making a losing fight, a third bird suddenly intervened, and the eagle, as I thought, was driven away.  “Good for the brotherhood of fish-hawks!” I exclaimed.  But at that moment I put my glass on the new-comer; and behold, he was not a hawk, but another eagle.  Meanwhile the hawk had disappeared with his fish, and I was left to ponder the mystery.