Charlie went ahead, with Sailor standing in the bow quivering with excitement.  The necessity of absolute silence, of course, had been impressed upon us all by the most severe of all sportsmen.  But the admonition was scarcely necessary, for, as the sun rose, the scene that spread before us was beautiful enough to have hushed the most garrulous tongue.  Far and near stretched misty levels of milkwhite water, in which the mangrove trees made countless islands, sometimes of considerable extent, impenetrable coppices often thirty or forty feet high.  From horizon to horizon there was nothing but white water and these coppice-islands of laurel green—­one so like another that I marvelled how Charlie expected to find his way back to camp again in the evening.  As the sun rose, flooding the wide floors with lonely splendour, it smote upon what at first I took to be gleaming clouds of purest silver unrolling before it.  It was an angelic host of white herons soaring and circling, stainless spirits of the dawn high up in the fathomless blue.  As we stole silently along in our skiffs, it seemed to me that we were invading some sanctuary of morning, “occult, withdrawn,” at the far limits of the world.

I looked around to see how it was all affecting my young friend.  He was close behind, almost at my shoulder—­his beautiful young face like that of a Greek god in a dream.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” he mused, in that voice like a musical instrument.  My heart went out to him in gratitude, for, as I caught sight of Charlie’s serious figure ahead—­with no thought, I was sure, but duck—­I realised how lonely I would have been amid all that solemn morning without my young fellow-worshipper.

Presently, the herons alighted on one of the near-by mangrove coppices, and it was as though the green bushes had suddenly been clothed with miraculous white flowers—­or been buried under a fall of virgin snow.  High up against the sun, several larger birds were uncouthly gambolling in morning joy.  It was hard to believe that they were pelicans—­such different birds they seemed from their foolish moping fellows at the Zoo.  And ah! yonder, riding innocent of danger, filling the morning air with their peaceful quacking, a huge glittering fleet of—­teal.

At the sight, Charlie turned with solemn warning hand—­at which I heard my young friend behind me smothering his profane laughter—­and made various signs by which Tom (who was poling me) and I understood that our job, and also that of my companion, was to steal behind one mangrove copse after another till we had got on the other side of that unsuspecting squadron—­which might then be expected to take flight in Charlie’s direction and rush by him in a terrified whirlwind.  This not very easy feat of stalking we were able to accomplish, thereby winning Charlie’s immense approval and putting him a splendid temper for the rest of the day; for, as the wild cloud swept over him, he was able to bring down no less than seven.  Like a true sportsman, in telling the story afterward in John Saunders’s snuggery, he averred that the number was nine!