wide creek near an inlet; a flock of more than fifty tall, glistening egrets completely covering, as though a shining white blanket were spread over it, the low, dense cassena thicket on a little hummock in the marsh. All these, and the long-winged royal terns and skimmers, the loquacious rails and willets, the handsome black and white red-billed oystercatchers, the graceful least terns, and the busy, restless sandpiper regiments on the curving inlet shore were familiar sights to Sanute and they interested him little. He had fed even more bounteously than usual. The languor of complete satiety was upon him. It was time for his midday siesta.
Some whim turned his bill towards the distant mainland woods instead of the barrier island jungle where he usually took his noon nap. Perhaps it was the sight of the egrets on the hummock far beneath him which put the notion in his head, for the place that he had in mind was a certain cypress-bordered freshwater lagoon where a great egret city was situated. Perhaps Fate had something to do with it—Fate which often, like an all-powerful, relentless genie or wizard of the wilderness, seems to arrange with the most minute care those tragic dramas of the woods which are none the less real because man so seldom witnesses them.
At any rate, when Sanute, after mounting almost as high as the towering eagles, set out for the lonely
