But we have lost the thread of our discourse, and must pause to search for it, even like a spinster of old, in the dis arranged spindle of one of those pretty little wheels now heard no more in the humble ingle, hushed by machinery clink-clanking with power-looms in every town and city of the land. Another year, and we often found ourselves--alone--or with one chosen comrade; for even then we began to have our sympathies and antipathies, not only with roses and lilies, or to cats and cheese, but with or to the eyes, and looks, and foreheads, and hair, and voices, and motions, and silence, and rest of human beings, loving them with a perfect love--we must not say hating them with a perfect hatred--alone or with a friend, among the mists and marshes of moors, in silent and stealthy search of the solitary curlew, that is, the Whaup! At first sight of his long bill aloft above the rushes, we could hear our heart beating quick time in the desert; at the turning of his neck, the body being yet still, our heart ceased to beat altogether--and we grew sick with hope when near enough to see the wild beauty of his eye. Unfolded, like a thought, was then the brown silence of the shy creature's ample wings--and with a warning cry he wheeled away upon the wind, unharmed by our ineffectual hail, seen falling far short of the deceptive distance, while his mate that had lain couched--perhaps in her nest of eggs or young, exposed yet hidden--within killing range, half-running, half-flying, flapped herself into flight, simulating lame leg and wounded wing; and the two disappearing together behind the hills, left us in our vain reason thwarted by instinct, to resume with live hopes rising out of the ashes of the dead, our daily disappointed quest over the houseless mosses. Yet now and then to our steady aim the bill of the whaup disgorged blood--and as we felt the feathers in our hand, and from tip to tip eyed the outstretched wings, Fortune, we felt, had no better boon to bestow, earth no greater triumph.
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!
