them; and, instead of eating, they are eaten.
After all, the instinct of hunting and catching something is as strong in the human breast as in that of cat or tiger; and we all share the exultation which sends a shout from boat to boat as a new acquisition is added to our prospective dinner-store.
And now right in front of us looms up from the depth of a group of pines and magnolias a white skeleton of a tree, with gnarled arms, bleached by years of wind and sun, swathed with long waving folds of gray moss. On the very tip-top of this, proudly above all possibility of capture, a fish-hawk's nest is built. Full eighty feet in the air, and about the size of a flour-barrel; built like an old marauding baron's stronghold in the middle ages, in inaccessible fastnesses; lined within and swathed without with gray moss, – it is a splendid post of observation. We can see the white head and shoulders of the bird perched upon her nest; and already they perceive us. The pair rise and clap their wings, and discourse to each other with loud, shrill cries, perhaps of indignation, that we who have houses to dwell in, and beef and chickens to eat, should come up and invade their fishing-grounds.
The fish-hawk – I beg his pardon, the fish-eagle; for I can see that he is a bird of no mean size and proportions – has as good a right to think that the river and the fish were made for him as we; and better too, because the Creator has endowed him with wonderful eyesight, which enables him, from the top of a tree eighty feet high, to search the depths of the river, mark his prey, and dive down with unerring certainty to it. He has his charter in his eyes, his beak, his claws; and doubtless he has a right to remonstrate, when we, who have neither eyes, beaks, nor claws adapted to the purpose, manage to smuggle away his dinner. Thankful are we that no mighty hunter is aboard, and that the atrocity of shooting a bird on her nest will not be perpetrated here. We are a harmless company, and mean so well by them, that they really might allow us one dinner out of their larder.
We have rowed as far up Julington as is expedient, considering that we have to row down again; and so we land in the immediate vicinity of our fish-eagle's fortress, greatly to his discontent. Wild, piercing cries come to us now and then from the heights of the eyry; but we, unmoved, proceed with our dinner-preparations.
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