EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT. 165 
complaining cry comes from the darkness around the boat—a sub- 
dued yéh!—yéh! yéh!—-yéh! and our guide tells us that a pair 
of flood-gulls are passing—following the flood-tide and feeding 
as they go. 
Another weird nocturnal scene is vouchsafed us before the pro- 
saic light of day lessens the mystery, but not the interest of the 
vague sounds and shapes of this first night. We escape the storm 
by sleeping in the great launching room of the station, with the 
wonderful self-righting and self-bailing surf-boats on either hand. 
About midnight the bright moonlight pours through the wide 
double doors and awakens us, and going out we find that a won- 
derful change has taken place. Perfect calm has succeeded the 
storm, and the great yellow moon, occasionally dimmed with 
fleecy clouds, makes the vast stretches of marsh only more black, 
with here and there a silvered bit of water. The slack tide ripples 
against the reeds, and from everywhere, back in the marsh, along 
the water, and even from under the station itself, comes a most 
weird and bewildering chorus—the subdued chuck! chuck! of 
invisible clapper rails. 
Cobb Island is a link in the chain of outlying islands which 
threads our coast from New Jersey south to the Carolinas. It is 
about twenty miles north of Cape Charles, opposite Cheriton Sta- 
tion on the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad. This 
island was at one time a fashionable summer resort of Virginians, 
and as early as the civil war had one or more large hotels and 
several private dwellings. The former owner of the island, a 
man named Cobb, accumulated a small fortune by making salt 
from sea-water, and being proprietor of this summer resort. In 
those days the island was about fifteen miles long and three or 
four miles wide, and was at a safe elevation above sea-level. 
Some ten years ago currents of the ocean began to undermine 
the island, and now it is uninhabited, its hotels and dwellings hav- 
ing been washed away. Reduced to about one-half its former size, 
Cobb Island is still one of the principal breeding-grounds of the 
sea-birds of our middle Atlantic coast. The trust which the 
white-winged creatures placed in old Ocean, depending on her for 
daily food, and rearing their young almost within reach of her 
waves, was not misplaced. With a rush and a swirl she toppled 
over the structures of the human intruders, drove them in terror 
from the island, and left but shifting sand-dunes, safe only for 
the sea-swallows and their kin whose cries had echoed the roar of 
the surf so many years before their human enemies appeared. 
The island may be divided longitudinally into six zones, which 
