marsh between his farm and the dyke, was lying in wait for the evening flight of the sea-ducks, who were accustomed to feed far out on the tides by day and fly in to rest at night on the sedgy meres. He was also not without hope of bagging a brant or a goose. For this was the season of the Northward Flight. That most noble and splendid of game-birds, the great Canada goose, was now winging up from his winter feeding grounds in the rank subtropical lagoons around the Gulf of Mexico to his desolate nesting-places among the uncharted, swampy lakes of the lone north. Last night, lying awake in his bed, Steve Barron had listened, with the thrill which that mysterious sound never failed to give him, to the faint, sonorous, pulsing voices, as flock after flock winnowed high overhead through the dark. In his imagination, in
Which is the bliss of solitude,
he pictured them, in slender V-shaped array, driving their sure way straight north on tireless wings, high up in the vaulted night. Far off he would catch, first, a scarcely audible sound,—honka-honk wavering and dying away; then swiftly growing louder on the stillness, till passing overhead it became a loud and hollow, indescribably musical, throbbing of honka-honka-honka-honka-honka,—
