able, ten or twelve or even a score of nests to each small tree. And everywhere—on the nests, in the trees and in the air—the great snowy birds, buoyant as air itself, graceful beyond description, adorned with long delicate plumes which drooped beyond their tails, perched and circled and soared.
John Marston sat like one entranced. For ten years or more he had visited the egret city many times each spring and summer; yet its magic never grew stale. His gaze shifted from point to point of the bewildering, ever-changing panorama before him; now resting upon a lone pyramidal cypress near the center of the lake where more than fifty egrets, young birds and adults, crowded together so closely as to hide almost entirely the lustrous foliage of the tree; now lingering upon a dead cypress-top across the lagoon where four big black snakebirds or anhingas, grotesque reminders of the incredible bird-reptiles of the incredible past, stood with their long sombre wings half-opened to the sun while all around them in the air white egrets and smaller blue herons, which shared the egret city, sailed and swerved—a kaleidoscopic aërial whirlpool of color and life.
Often the little old man's eyes, as though fascinated by the sight, returned to a spot near the middle of the lagoon where three great alligators
