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Pines, willows, cotton-wood, two kinds of hickory, water-oak, live-oak, sweet-gum, magnolia, the red and white bay-tree, a few red cedars, and haw-bushes, with many species not known to me, made up a rich wall of verdure on either side, as I sped along with a light heart to Columbus, where my compagnons de voyage were to meet me. Wood-ducks and egrets, in small flocks, inhabited the forest.

When winter came they went far into the woods to hunt. And going on, they reached at last a very large and beautiful lake. It was covered with water-fowl. There were wild geese and brant, black ducks and wood-ducks, and all the smaller kinds down to teal and whistlers. The small boy was delighted to see so much game. He eagerly asked his brother how he meant to catch them.

Here we found the river suddenly turn round to the southward and eastward, bringing us back within five hundred yards of where we started from, which was one mile West by South 1/2 South from the morning's observation spot. Brown whistling wood-ducks now made their appearance, and being unaccustomed to man and his destructive weapons, allowed us to revel in wildfowl for some days afterwards.

Into this magic borderland, dimmer for moonlit glimpses in ghostly contrast to the shadow shape of wood and glade, Eileen conducted Selwyn; and they heard the whirr of painted wood-ducks passing in obscurity, and the hymn of the four winds off Wonder Head; and they heard the herons, noisy in their heronry, and a young fox yapping on a moon-struck dune.

That is, we are doing all this in the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other water-fowl soars and swims.