RENAISSANCE 1 49 



ingness. As the shadow crept slowly across and a strange, 

 cool, directionless wind arose, and the sea and the rolling 

 Bermuda hills shone in a weird, uncanny light, I shivered 

 and again felt the loneliness of the whole earth in space. 

 The unseasonable lowing of cows, the calls of birds, the 

 chirps of crickets in this false evening showed that I was 

 not alone in this feeling of strangeness. 



After the ninety per cent of obliteration had passed, 

 and the real evening had come and gone, there began an- 

 other phenomenon, which too seemed rather cosmic than 

 earthly. Shortly after dark v/e were drawn outside our 

 laboratory by the chirps and twitters of birds, and from 

 high up in the sky came down the calls of hundreds of 

 these magnetized fluffs of feathers, now an invisible pha- 

 lanx of plover and sandpipers; then to the blackness of 

 another part of the sky our ears were directed by the 

 sweet notes of a legion of warblers, while our eyes could 

 detect only the astral outline of Cygnus forever flying 

 down the milky way. There was no doubt about the 

 direction. As the eye follows a line of dots or dashes 

 across white paper, so my ear could trace the course of 

 some one bird, whose call-note was marked by a slight 

 peculiarity, across the impenetrability of the night's black- 

 ness, and always these sound lines pointed south. When I 

 remembered the seven hundred-odd miles of calm and 

 stormy waters over which the little wings had to flutter 

 unfalteringly, I was tempted to remove this feat from a 

 biological to an astronomical one. 



