Ch. 24: Seen and Lost - Page 2

grown dim; yet I saw it only for a few
moments, when it hopped out from, the thick foliage and perched within
two or three yards of me, not afraid, but only curious; and after
peering at me first with one eye and then the other, and wiping its
small dagger on a twig, it flew away and was seen no more. For many days
I sought for it, and for years waited its reappearance, and it was more
to me than ninety and nine birds which I had always known; yet it was
very modest, dressed in a brown suit, very pale on the breast and white
on the throat, and for distinction a straw-coloured stripe over the
eye--that ribbon which Queen Nature bestows on so many of her feathered
subjects, in recognition, I suppose, of some small and common kind of
merit. If I should meet with it in a collection I should know it again;
only, in that case it would look plain and homely to me--this little
bird that for a time made all others seem unbeautiful.

Even a richer prize may come in sight for a brief period--one of the
nobler mammalians, which are fewer in number, and bound to earth like
ourselves, and therefore so much better known than the wandering
children of air. In. some secluded spot, resting amidst luxuriant
herbage or forest undergrowth, a slight rustling makes us start, and,
lo! looking at us from the clustering leaves, a strange face; the
leaf-like ears erect, the dark eyes round with astonishment, and the
sharp black nose twitching and sniffing audibly, to take in the
unfamiliar flavour of a human presence from the air, like the pursed-up
and smacking lips of a wine-drinker tasting a new vintage. No sooner
seen than gone, like a dream, a phantom, the quaint furry face to be
thereafter only an image in memory.

Sometimes the prize may be a very rich one, and actually within reach of
the hand--challenging the hand, as it were, to grasp it, and yet
presently slip away to be seen no more, although it maybe sought for day
after day, with a hungry longing comparable to that of some poor tramp
who finds a gold doubloon in the forest, and just when he is beginning
to realize all that it means to him drops it in the grass and cannot
find it again. There is not the faintest motion in the foliage, no
rustle of any dry leaf, and yet we know that something has
moved--something has come or has gone; and, gazing fixedly at one spot,
we suddenly see that it is still there, close to us, the pointed
ophidian head and long neck, not drawn back and threatening, but sloping
forward, dark and polished as the green and purple weed-stems springing
from marshy soil, and with an irregular chain of spots extending down
the side. Motionless, too, as the stems it is; but presently the tongue,
crimson and glistening, darts out and flickers, like a