Did you ever hear of a Southern bird--a sort of hawk, I think--that almost never alights; that lives and eats and sleeps its whole life away on the wing?
and even its courtship, and its honeymoon?
Grace Ferrall pointed one out to me last winter, near Palm Beach--a slender bird, part black, part snowy white, with long, pointed, delicate wings like an enormous swallow; and all day, all night, it floats and soars and drifts in the upper air, never resting, never alighting except during its brief nesting season.

...

Think of the exquisite bliss of drifting one's life through in mid-air--to sleep, balanced on light wings, upborne by invisible currents flowing under the stars--to sail dreamily through the long sunshine, to float under the moon! ...

And at last, I suppose, when its time has come, down it whirls out of the sky, stone dead! ...

There is something thrilling in such a death--something magnificent.