Take a secluded bend of any stream, with its alders and willows, its wild flowers stealing down to the water's edge to see their faces in the glass, and yellow flags boldly wading out by their companies and battalions into mid-stream. The dragon-flies poise upon the tips of the reeds, or with rustling wings dart and wheel upon the water, puzzling the coot's flotilla of puff-balls paddling about among the water-daisies. The scene is sweetly pretty, and when on a sudden a kingfisher on sapphire wings comes flashing past, enhancing every charm by its transient brilliance, the pretty becomes lovely, and the little common reach of water catches a glimpse of fairyland possibilities, and of beauties something rarer than of every day. Then let a heron on its broad slow-moving wings come up the stream, and lo! the whole scene changes. It becomes at once unfamiliar, of another world, exotic. The heron's long legs are dropped down, the long neck stretched out and, almost as a spectre might appear, there stands "the bird so gaunt," its crest-feathers slightly raised, its eyes scrutinising the banks. Silent as the great bird is, you must keep more silent still. For it is watching and listening as only the bird can do that fishes by sound as well as by sight. If it is satisfied, the aigrette, "fit for the turban of a king," droops flat to its head, the neck is retracted, the wings comfortably closed, and the heron relapses into that beautiful attitude of patient watchfulness that Art delights in. And as it stands there, motionless in misty grey, in the utter silence of the tranquil corner, it looks like one of the jinns of Arabian tales, for its being there seems to bewitch the place and the stream becomes haunted. So I remember once how when I was in India lying down in the jungle waiting for a bear to be driven, a sambhur-stag with splendid antlers came spectrally into the open space that my rifle covered. An instant before it was empty. Not a leaf stirred, and yet there, on the sudden, stood the great-horned stag, only a few paces from me, listening to the distant voices of the beaters. An instant later, and it stepped into the jungle again and vanished as silently, completely, as a ghost. And I rubbed my eyes and blinked, but I know that it came and that it went.