the bounty of this vast liquid magazine of nature.  High over all these hovers one, whose action instantly arrests his whole attention.  By his wide curvature of wing, and sudden, suspension in air, he knows him to be the fish hawk, settling over some devoted victim of the deep.  His eye kindles at the sight, and, balancing himself, with half-opened wings, on the branch, he watches the result.  Down, rapid as an arrow from heaven, descends the distant object of his attention, the roar of its wings reaching the ear as it disappears in the deep, making the surges foam around!  At this moment, the eager looks of the eagle are all ardour; and, levelling his neck for flight, he sees the fish hawk once more emerge, struggling with his prey, and mounting in the air with screams of exultation.  These are the signals for our hero, who, launching into the air, instantly gives chase, and soon gains on the fish hawk; each exerts his utmost to mount above the other, displaying in these rencontres the most elegant and sublime aerial evolutions.  The unencumbered eagle rapidly advances, and is just on the point of reaching his opponent, when, with a sudden scream, probably of despair and honest execration, the latter drops his fish; the eagle, poising himself for a moment, as if to take a more certain aim, descends like a whirlwind, snatches it in his grasp ere it reaches the water, and bears his ill-gotten booty silently away to the woods.

These predatory attacks and defensive manoeuvres of the eagle and the fish hawk, are matters of daily observation along the whole of our sea board, from Georgia to New England, and frequently excite great interest in the spectators.  Sympathy, however, on this as on most other occasions, generally sides with the honest and laborious sufferer, in opposition to the attacks of power, injustice, and rapacity, qualities for which our hero is so generally notorious, and which, in his superior man, are certainly detestable.  As for the feelings of the poor fish, they seem altogether out of the question.

When driven, as he sometimes is, by the combined courage and perseverance of the fish hawks from their neighbourhood, and forced to hunt for himself, he retires more inland, in search of young pigs, of which he destroys great numbers.  In the lower parts of Virginia and North Carolina, where the inhabitants raise vast herds of those animals, complaints of this kind are very general against him.  He also destroys young lambs in the early part of spring; and will sometimes attack old sickly sheep, aiming furiously at their eyes.

In corroboration of the remarks I have myself made on the manners of the bald eagle, many accounts have reached me from various persons of respectability, living on or near our sea coast.  The substance of all these I shall endeavour to incorporate with the present account.

Mr. John L. Gardiner, who resides on an island of three thousand acres, about three miles from the eastern point of Long Island, from which it is separated by Gardiner’s Bay, and who has consequently many opportunities of observing the habits of these birds, has favoured me with a number of interesting particulars on this subject; for which I beg leave thus publicly to return my grateful acknowledgment.