318 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



gulls are of many varieties : the dark mantled greater black- 

 backed gull, the blue-legged common gull, the smaller black- 

 head, distinguished now only by two dark ear spots, and by 

 its bill and legs of crimson, and the herring gull, with pale 

 blue back and pinky feet. But young birds of the year, of 

 the larger species, clad in freckled greys, muster up in vastly 

 larger numbers. 



There is often much of interest to be noted at the tide- 

 mark. You may find the long ribbon-like streamers of the 

 sea-tangle, the olive-brown fronds of the serrated wrack, the 

 bladdered fucus and the oar weed — this last often attached 

 to a valve of the horse mussel ; whilst star fishes, the weed- 

 like corallines and zoophites, lumps of the egg-cases of the 

 whelk and feebly struggling pear-crabs, with rarer and even 

 more interesting products of the sea, go to swell this ' margin 

 of all things vile.' Sometimes the scouring underwash lays 

 bare the delicately brown shells of the radiated trough shell, 

 the long fingerlike razor valves, and hermit crabs robed in 

 discarded shells of whelk, casting them up with the rest to 

 the delight of the sea birds. Amongst the debris one often 

 finds numbers of herrings, the more or less putrid carcases of 

 the largest fish, whose weight caused them to drop back from 

 the meshes of the nets. With them dull-eyed mackerel, 

 victims also of the nets, and, maybe, weevers, and here and 

 there a whiting, and among them the picked or spiked dog- 

 fishes. Often we find the wicked grey eye of this little 

 shark still glistening. It is an interesting experiment to 

 dissect them. As often as not you may turn out from a 

 sea-dog's stomach, chestnut-shaped pieces of herring — always 

 of the largest and best, the fisherfolk will tell you — which 

 they had bitten from the dead fishes as they hung sus- 

 pended in the vertical nets. 



That large-eyed fish, the scad, or horse mackerel, often 



