Page:War Drums (1928).pdf/232

 lagoon ringed round on both sides and at the back by young cypresses, bright green with the fresh foliage of spring. The placid waters were of a most vivid and beautiful blue; and presently down to the young cypresses bordering them floated a host of milk-white birds, slender, plumed, and graceful. By scores and hundreds they came eddying down from the higher air, crowding the cypresses at the water's edge, covering them so densely that in places they seemed to be mantled with snow.

She lay motionless, listening to the music of the singing birds, watching the scene before her.

Still the wide-winged, immaculate egrets floated down, like giant snowflakes almost as light as air, until all the cypresses were white with them and hundreds stood in the shallow waters around the margins of the blue lagoon. Twice, as she watched, flocks of wild turkeys flew out of the woods on one side of the lagoon into the woods on the other side; and once she heard the shrill screeching of parrakeets and saw a regiment of brilliant green and yellow forms shoot at incredible speed across the open space before her. Above the water a company of fork-tailed kites, as swift and buoyant as swallows, swooped and swerved with marvellous grace in an intricate aerial maze; while along a grassy tongue of land thrusting out from the farther shore a troop of five deer walked slowly down to the water's edge and for some minutes stood there drinking, lifting their heads now and then to gaze curiously across the