Hawks, of course, are always in sight, and that in astonishing variety, from the osprey down to two or three varieties of the sparrow-hawk.  A monograph on the Raptores of Eagle Lake would be a most comprehensive work.  The osprey, notwithstanding the abundance of his scaly prey, is not common:  probably the field is too limited for him.  Ducks are the attraction of the other large species.  In summer, ducks are rather secondary among the water-birds, the ibis, water-turkey, and flamingo imparting a tropical character to the scene that somewhat obscures the more familiar forms.  There is even a survival here of birds that have nearly disappeared from the American fauna,—­the paroquet, once so common in the Mississippi Valley as far north as the Ohio, being sometimes seen, and, if I mistake not, a second species of humming-bird straying north by way of Mexico.

From where we stand, under a canopy of rich green leaves, looking out upon the sunny water through a banian-like colonnade of mighty trunks and hanging vines, the pearly moss tempering the light like jalousies, summer seems but a relative idea.  Fly-catchers flit back and forth, barn-swallows and sand-martins skim the lake, and an occasional splash or ripple at our feet shows that humbler life is getting astir.  The highest life, or what modest man calls such, we have all to ourselves.  Yet not quite; for there is visible yonder, beneath the outer tip of a live-oak which we have found to stretch and droop twenty-four paces from the seven-foot trunk, a little fleet of canoes.  They belong to the professional fisherman whose too tarry nets are quite an encumbrance for some yards of the sandy beach, and whose well may be noticed about a rifle-shot out from the shore.  More than that, though Piscator is absent, some one is inspecting his boats.  In fact,—­and it is simple fact, and I am not smuggling in a bit of padding in the shape of sentiment,—­two persons become perceptible, both with their backs towards us, now and studiedly all the time.  One, a man, chooses a boat after trying several, and, with similar show of unavoidable delay, is cushioning the seats with carefully-arranged moss in four times the necessary quantity.  During this absorbing process he rips one of his cuffs, or tears off a button from it, or smears it with the tar that besets the boat and its oars.  This calamity supplies the lady, a neat young person, with a pretext for occupation, and she uses it to the fullest and most affectionate extent.  It is growing late, and unless we relieve the couple of our obviously detected presence we shall deprive them of their Sunday-afternoon row.  That it is a row with the stream we find ten days later, when their wedding becomes the sensation of the little village.

The old, old story! how pat it comes in!  How could it have failed to come in, when the talk is of birds?

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

THE FERRYMAN’S FEE.