Shepherdstown register. [volume] (Shepherdstown, Va. [W. Va.]) 1849-1955, 1903-07-02
WHAT THE EAGLE SAW.

level wings, so hlgh III lue intense
blue that the strongest eyes, gazing
up from the earth, saw him only as a
moving speck, the eagle looked down
on a green expanse of field and forest,
threaded by a little, lazy, winding
river.
He was not hungry and it was not
for prey, in particular, that his pierre
ing eyes scanned the outspread world
below him. TO watch, and watch,
and in some simple way consider
what he observed from his aerial altl-
tude, was an occupation that always
interested the great eagle when not IN
hunting mood. He sailed slowly
in a vast circle, an almost impercep-
tible spiral, his tail widespread, his
wings fitting ever so little, to one
side or the other, his snow-white head
and neck thrust downward below the
level of his ash-brown back. Miles
away to the eastward he saw the sea,
a shining line toward which the lazy
river iourneyed reluctantly. In the
westward he saw a huddle of hills,
in the heart of which a nest on a
white cliff held his two well-fed nest
lings. Beyond those hills cleaned
wilderness lake, with his tireless mate
sailing over it, hunting, ever hunting,
as was her eager wont. To the south,
dim roofs and spires and cloud of
smoke, obnoxious to his eyes, marked
busy city, and everywhere to the
northward stretched the green and
purple of the forest.
But what held most Of his tranquil
attention was the country just below
him-s patchwork of scattered farms,
woodland and half-wild meadow strung
along the windings of the river. He
noted the busy, sheltered life of the
farmyards, from which he was too
wise to take tribute. He noted the
men tilling their young crops, or
driving slow teams along the rough
backwoods roads. And with a savage
thrill he noted the growing lambs
with their new-shoru mothers in the
hillocky, green and brown stump lots.
The lambs were too big now to in
terest him as quarry; but he remem-
bered how at the first of spring he
had swooped on certain newborn,
bleating things, in the solitude of the
remotest pastures, and he remem-
bered, too, certain occasions when the
lightning thrust of his wings, the
deadly clutch of his talons, had been
foiled by the battering forehead and
hoofs of the mother eve, till he had
been glad to flap retreat from the en-
counter. With kind Of vague friend
liness, very curious in heart so tame
less and sioof as bis, he noted the
red-and-white cattle feeding in a
spacious, grassy pasture at a distance
from any house. In the middle Of
this pasture rose a tall, half dead pine
tree, on whose topmost stub Of a
branch he was wont at times to perch.
OF the cattle he had nothing to fear
a. foes, nothing to hope as prey; nor
did they evidence toward his presence
and occasional low lowering flight any
interest beyond that of placid curios-
ity. He had come to regard them
as, in a manner, his sole peers in the
wilderness world.
At last, however, he noted some
thing which stirred him to liveler
interest. A slight dilation took place
n the pupils of his vivid eyes, and al
teriug the tilt of his pinions he began
to sink, very slowly, from his cold
height in the blue
Immediately below him, in a pile
of stones close by the water, pair Of
weasels had their nest. He had seen
the two come out and run sinuously
over the stones. Then the male had
glided away on hunting tour, while
the smaller female had slipped, 1.-the
as a snake, back into the nest to her
young ones. Against the pile Of stones
and in part surrounded by It rose a
ragged and meager birch tree, stripped,
of half its limbs by lightning stroke,
but still putting forth to the young
summer two or three live branches,
with their tribute of tender green.
From the roots of the old birch a firm
sward sloped away ten feet to the
waterside, where it slightly overhung
To big muskrat, swimming down
stream near the shore, this seemed the
ideal spot in which TO establish new