Hush--stoop--kneel--crawl--for by all our hopes of mercy--a heron--a heron! An eel dangling across his bill! And now the water-serpent has disappeared! From morning dawn hath the fowl been fishing here--perhaps on that very stone--for it is one of those days when eels are a-roaming in the shallows, and the heron knows that they are as likely to pass by that stone as any other--from morning dawn--and 'tis now past meridian, half-past two! Be propitious, oh ye Fates! and never--never--shall he again fold his wings on the edge of his gaping nest, on the trees that overtop the only tower left of the old castle. Another eel! and we too can crawl silent as the sinuous serpent. Flash! Bang! over he goes dead--no, not dead--but how unlike that unavailing flapping, as head-over-heels he goes spinning over the tarn, to the serene unsettling of himself from sod or stone, when, his hunger sated, and his craw filled with fish for his far-off brood, he used to lift his blue bulk into the air, and with long depending legs, at first floated away like a wearied thing, but soon, as his plumes felt the current of air homewards flowing, urged swifter and swifter his easy course--laggard and lazy no more--leaving leagues behind him, ere you had shifted your motion in watching his cloudlike career, soon invisible among the woods! The disgorged eels are returned--some of them alive--to their native element--the mud. And the dead heron floats away before small winds and waves into the middle of the tarn. Where is he--the matchless Newfoundlander--_nomine gaudens_ FRO, because white as the froth of the sea? Off with a collie. So--stript with the first intention, we plunge from a rock, and, "Though in the scowl of heaven, the tarn Grows dark as we are swimming," Draco-like, breast-high, we stem the surge, and with the heron floating before us, return to the heather-fringed shore, and give three cheers that startle the echoes, asleep from year's end to year's end, in the Grey-Linn Cairn.