One thinks of Stirling and of the castles frowning down upon the Rhine as he comes out of the wide, flat marsh beneath this great nest, crowning this loftiest eminence in all the region.  But no chateau of the Alps, no beetling crag-lodged castle of the Rhine, can match the fish-hawk’s nest for sheer boldness and daring.  Only the eagles’ nests upon the fierce dizzy pinnacles in the Yosemite surpass the home of the fish-hawk in unawed boldness.  The aery of the Yosemite eagle is the most sublimely defiant of things built by bird, or beast, or man.

A fish-hawk will make its nest upon the ground, or a hummock, a stump, a buoy, a chimney—­upon anything near the water that offers an adequate platform; but its choice is the dead top of some lofty tree where the pathway for its wide wings is open and the vision range is free for miles around.

How dare the bird rear such a pile upon so slight and towering a support!  How dare she defy the winds, which, loosened far out on the bay, come driving across the cowering, unresisting marsh!  She is too bold sometimes.  I have known more than one nest to fall in a wild May gale.  Many a nest, built higher and wider year after year, while all the time its dead support has been rotting and weakening, gets heavy with the wet of winter, and some night, under the weight of an ice-storm, comes crashing to the earth.

Yet twelve years had gone since I scaled the walls and stood within this nest; and with patience and hardihood enough I could have done it again this time, no doubt.  I remember one nest along Maurice River, perched so high above the gums of the swamp as to be visible from my home across a mile of trees, that has stood a landmark for the oystermen this score of years.

The sensations of my climb into this fish-hawk’s nest of the marsh are vivid even now.  Going up was comparatively easy.  When I reached the forks holding the nest, I found I was under a bulk of sticks and corn-stalks which was about the size of an ordinary haycock or an unusually large wash-tub.  By pulling out, pushing aside, and breaking off the sticks, I worked a precarious way through the four feet or more of debris and scrambled over the edge.  There were two eggs.  Taking them in my hands, so as not to crush them, I rose carefully to my feet.

Upright in a hawk’s nest!  Sixty feet in the air, on the top of a gaunt old white oak, high above the highest leaf, with the screaming hawks about my head, with marsh and river and bay lying far around!  It was a moment of exultation; and the thrill of it has been transmitted through the years.  My body has been drawn to higher places since; but my soul has never quite touched that altitude again, for I was a boy then.

Nor has it ever shot swifter, deeper into the abyss of mortal terror than followed with my turning to descend.  I looked down into empty air.  Feet foremost I backed over the rim, clutching the loose sticks and feeling for a foothold.  They snapped with the least pressure; slipped and fell if I pushed them, or stuck out into my clothing.  Suddenly the sticks in my hands pulled out, my feet broke through under me, and for an instant I hung at the side of the nest in the air, impaled on a stub that caught my blouse as I slipped.