No month or day or hour fails to bring vital changes--tragedies and comedies--to the network of life of these tropical gardens; but as we drive along the broad paths of an afternoon, the quiet vistas show only waving palms, weaving vultures, and swooping kiskadees, with bursts of color from bougainvillea, flamboyant, and queen of the flowers. At certain times, however, the tide of visible change swelled into a veritable bore of life, gently and gradually, as quiet waters become troubled and then pass into the seething uproar of rapids. In late afternoon, when the long shadows of palms stretched their blue-black bars across the terra-cotta roads, the foliage of the green bamboo islands was dotted here and there with a scattering of young herons, white and blue and parti-colored. Idly watching them through glasses, I saw them sleepily preening their sprouting feathers, making ineffectual attempts at pecking one another, or else hunched in silent heron-dream. They were scarcely more alive than the creeping, hour-hand tendrils about them, mere double-stemmed, fluffy petaled blossoms, no more strange than the nearest vegetable blooms--the cannon-ball mystery, the sand-box puzzle, sinister orchids, and the false color-alarms of the white-bracted silver-leaf. Compared with these, perching herons are right and seemly fruit. As I watched them I suddenly stiffened in sympathy, as I saw all vegetable sloth drop away and each bird become a detached individual, plucked by an electric emotion from the appearance of a thing of sap and fiber to a vital being of tingling nerves. I followed their united glance, and overhead there vibrated, lightly as a thistledown, the first incoming adult heron, swinging in from a day's fishing along the coast. It went on and vanished among the fronds of a distant island; but the calm had been broken, and through all the stems there ran a restless sense of anticipation, a zeitgeist of prophetic import. One felt that memory of past things was dimming, and content with present comfort was no longer dominant. It was the future to which both the baby herons and I were looking, and for them realization came quickly. The sun had sunk still lower, and great clouds had begun to spread their robes and choose their tints for the coming pageant. And now the vanguard of the homing host appeared,--black dots against blue and white and salmon,--thin, gaunt forms with slow-moving wings which cut the air through half the sky. The little herons and I watched them come--first a single white egret, which spiralled down, just as I had many times seen the first returning Spad eddy downward to a cluster of great hump-backed hangars; then a trio of tricolored herons, and six little blues, and after that I lost count. It seemed as if these tiny islands were magnets drawing all the herons in the world.