IN THE SHETLANDS 55 
was as though she had attempted suicide, but no 
cormorant, I suppose, would do so in such a way. 
What a strange sight this was! What a gargoyle of 
a creature—alive, in these gloomy shades! It seemed 
not a bird, but something in The Faerie Queen, one of 
The uncouth things of faerie, 
—a line, by the way, which only resembles Spenser 
by being, probably, unfamiliar to most people. But 
our knowledge makes things commonplace. Did the 
fairies exist, they would be classified, and, with Latin 
names and description of their habits, would be no 
more rea/ly the fairies than are birds or beasts. Let 
one but know nothing, and these caverns are en- 
chanted. 
It is not often that one has so close a view of a shag 
as this. My head was but a foot or so off, and on 
a level with her own; my eyes looked into her glass- 
green ones. One thing about her struck me with 
wonder, and that was the intense brilliancy of the 
whole inside of her mouth, which, in a blaze of 
gamboge, seemed to imitate, in miniature, the cavern 
in which she sat. Most stupidly I did not think to 
open the bill of the chick whilst I had it in my hand, 
in order to see what its mouth was like. As bearing 
on the conjecture which I have formed, this would 
have interested me, and such an opportunity is not 
likely to come again. I noticed, however, that the 
naked skin about the beak, which, in the grown bird, 
is thus vividly coloured, was very much lighter, and 
