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 brooding mate lifted her head, as if in greeting, and laid it back at once between her shoulders, with her yellow bill pointed skyward as was her vigilant custom.

Soon the first warm tints of sunset began to stain the edges of the clouds above the far fringes of the swamp. Motionless and erect beside his mate, the bittern watched the oncoming of the enchantment as his day drew to its quiet close. Suddenly the colored quiet of the air was disturbed by the throbbing of hurried wings. He glanced upward, without moving. A mallard drake, in frantic flight, whirred past, making for the water. Close after the fugitive, and swiftly overhauling him with long tremendous thrusts of his mighty wings, came that most dreaded cut-throat of the air, a great, blue goshawk. Had the water been two feet farther away the fate of the glossy drake would have been sealed. He would have been overtaken, his throat torn out in mid-air, his body carried off to the nearest tree top to be plucked and devoured. But this time the inscrutable Fates of the wilderness, too seldom so lenient to the weak, decided to favor him. With a heavy sounding splash he shot down into the blessed water, and disappeared into safety.

The destroying talons of the great hawk