Most of the fields on the country-side are now laid up for hay, or down in the tall haulming corn; and so I am driven from my accustomed botanizing grounds on the open, and compelled to take refuge in the wild bosky moor-land back of Hole Common.  Here, on the edge of the copse, the river widens to a considerable pool, and coming upon it softly through the wood from behind—­the boggy, moss-covered ground masking and muffling my foot-fall—­I have surprised a great, graceful ash-and-white heron, standing all unconscious on the shallow bottom, in the very act of angling for minnows.  The heron is a somewhat rare bird among the more cultivated parts of England; but just hereabouts we get a sight of one not infrequently, for they still breed in a few tall ash-trees at Chilcombe Park, where the lords of the manor in mediaeval times long preserved a regular heronry to provide sport for their hawking.  There is no English bird, not even the swan, so perfectly and absolutely graceful as the heron.  I am leaning now breathless and noiseless against the gate, taking a good look at him, as he stands half-knee deep on the oozy bottom, with his long neck arched over the water, and his keen purple eye fixed eagerly upon the fish below.  Though I am still twenty yards from where he poises lightly on his stilted legs, I can see distinctly his long pendent snow-white breast-feathers, his crest of waving black plumes, falling loosely backward over the ash-gray neck, and even the bright red skin of his bare legs just below the feathered thighs.  I dare hardly move nearer to get a closer view of his beautiful plumage; and still I will try.  I push very quietly through the gate, but not quite quietly enough for the heron.  One moment he raises his curved neck and poises his head a little on one side to listen for the direction of the rustling; then he catches a glimpse of me as I try to draw back silently behind a clump of flags and nettles; and in a moment his long legs give him a good spring from the bottom, his big wings spread with a sudden flap sky-wards, and almost before I can note what is happening he is off and away to leeward, making a bee-line for the high trees that fringe the artificial water in Chilcombe Hollow.

All these wading birds the herons, the cranes, the bitterns, the snipes, and the plovers are almost necessarily, by the very nature of their typical conformation, beautiful and graceful in form.  Their tall, slender legs, which they require for wading, their comparatively light and well-poised bodies, their long, curved, quickly-darting necks and sharp beaks, which they need in order to secure their rapid-swimming prey, all these things make the waders, almost in spite of themselves, handsome and shapely birds.  Their feet, it is true, are generally rather large and sprawling, with long, wide-spread toes, so as to distribute their weight on the snow-shoe principle, and prevent them from sinking in the deep soft mud on which they tread;