Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/121

 Tramping through the woods on his way to a certain lotus pond where many purple gallinules nested and reared their young, he had seen a large flock of egrets pass over high above the pines, flying eastward. They were bound, he knew, for the egret city, and reflecting that more than a week had passed since he had visited the place and that the young egrets would now be well grown, he had decided to let the gallinules wait for a day and had followed the big white birds.

For an hour he had been sitting on his oak stump beside the southern shore of the lagoon, an ideal post from which to watch the teeming life of the town. As always when he visited the egret metropolis, the wonder of it took possession of him. It was like a scene from another and more fantastic world, and the little old man, though skillful with words, had never been able to describe it.

To his right the tall, smooth, columnar trunks of great cypresses towered above the still water, their branches clothed with a gray spectral witchery of Spanish moss; but in front of him and to his left the cypress woods fell away and he looked out upon an open sunny lake walled in by young, dark-green, full-foliaged trees. In these marginal cypress woods and in small cypress groves and willow clumps rising here and there from the surface of the lake the egrets had their nests, nests which seemed innumer-