"A White Heron" begins on a June evening near the Maine coast. As the sun sets, nine-year-old Sylvia drives home a cow, her "valued companion." The child has no other playmates, and enjoys these evening walks with the cow, Mistress Moolly, and the hide-and-seek games the cow plays to escape being caught. It has taken an unusually long time to find the cow this night, and Sylvia hopes her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley, will not be worried. But Mrs. Tilley knows that Sylvia never hurries these walks, because she so loves wandering in the woods. After living her first eight years in a crowded and noisy city with her parents, Sylvia has found her true home with her grandmother in the country. Although she is afraid of people, "there never was such a child for straying about out-of-doors since the world was made!"

As the two companions...