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It is a very large parasite for so small a bird, yet so cunning and alert is it, and so swiftly is it able to swim through the plumage, that the bird is unable to rid itself of so undesirable a companion.
A few of them had imitations of Lancer caps, some had boots, some slippers, some spurs, others none; some had wondrous straps of tape and cord, others wore their trousers up to their knees; but one and all were entirely uniform in looking completely ill at ease and out of their element in their borrowed would-be-English plumage.
Now, think of that! There was another soldier who so believed in the Herons' right to life and plumage, that he was ready to protect them though it meant certain danger to himself! Yes, there is to this very day a soldier at Heron Camp. Do you know a way to keep him safe? Why, you children of America can do it if you will, and it need not cost one of you a penny. You can do it with your minds.
Length thirteen to sixteen inches, according to the length of the tail, which is deeply forked with slender outside feathers, like a Barn Swallow's. Plumage pure white, with a black cap on the head, a pearl-blue mantle, and silver-black shades on the long wing-feathers, which look as if they had hoar frost on them.
It was as if a ground-sparrow had changed her gray feathers for the burning plumage of some tropical wanderer; and it was natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth should have called her the fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the fire-hang-bird's nest, using the country boy's synonyme for the Baltimore oriole.
Your Roman task-mistresses; your drivers of lodging-house slaveys; your ladies who whipped their pages to death in the Middle Ages; your modern dames of fashion, decked with the plumage of the tortured grove. There have been other women also noble women, their names like beacon-lights studding the dark waste of history. So there have been noble men saints, martyrs, heroes.
Wonderful light, and miraculous, gleaming, cloud-filled sky, and wonderful birds preening their plumage and calling to each other, and wonderful breeze-swept water, bluer than the bluest depths of the Indian Ocean. It was still so early that, in the whole stretch of rollicking, tumbling, buoyant waters between bank and bank, only one piece of river-craft could be seen.
Or in passing through extensive desolate marshes, the dazzling white plumage of a stationary egret has exercised the same attraction.
On the middle perch the fluffy occupant, head tucked well into feathers, seemed so near to them as to be easily stroked, had they tried; even the delicate tips of his plumped-out plumage pencilled plainly on the illuminated screen. As they looked, the sleepy little fellow stirred uneasily, woke, shook himself, and raised his head.
Apparently they were talking and laughing, though at that distance upwards of a mile I could, of course, hear no word of what was said. All at once there began the most horrid, unearthly screaming, which at first startled me badly, though I had soon remembered the voice of Captain Flint, and even thought I could make out the bird by her bright plumage as she sat perched upon her master's wrist.
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