son, and as a result of this early start every heron home in the town contained young. Hence for the present the town seemed to belong to the herons rather than the anhingas. All day long the place rang with the ceaseless clamor of the heron families, while scarcely a sound of any sort came from the anhinga homes, where always, night and day, long-tailed, long-necked birds, the strangest and most fantastic of all the inhabitants of the swamp country, sat brooding over their bluish-white, chalky eggs which, some day soon, would turn into hungry nestlings as grotesque as the young herons had been when they made their entrance into the world.
In a cypress rising from the water fifty feet or so from the log where the buck had encountered the wildcat, a male anhinga sat in a nest placed in a crotch, formed by the trunk of the tree and the lowest of its straight, short limbs. Above him and all around him hung long festoons of gray Spanish moss swaying slightly in the gentle breeze and forming a sort of curtain round-about the nest, almost hiding it from view. Through gaps in this tapestry the sharp eyes of the brooding snakebird looked out upon the little world of the lagoon.
He had watched with keen interest the meeting of the buck and the wildcat on the bank nearby; and now, sitting motionless and impassive in the nest, his snakelike neck thrust well forward, his
