232 THE BIRD WATCHER 
boiling milk flung the raw meal—said it would 
be good like that. ‘‘ Women said so, that will say 
anything.” Sweetly they smiled, but they understood 
not the conditions. Oh fire that will not burn up! 
Oh kettle that will not boil! Oh egg that wi// 
crack when you drop it in! Oh one spoon that 
goeth a-missing! This, and much more “of this 
harness,” as the Spaniard says, has kept me up till 
ten or later—till eleven, once, when the frying bacon, 
‘in the very moment of projection,” was breathed on 
by the flame of paraffin. (Nothing but paraffin will 
make a fire burn up in the Shetlands, and even that 
gets damp sometimes.) So that, having my notes to 
extend and decipher, and with hard boards, and the 
wind, and a flea or so, and sometimes the lumbago, I 
may say, with Comus, almost any night, ‘‘ What has 
night to do with sleep?” but without being able to 
continue, for certainly it has no “better sweets to 
prove.” 
But perhaps I should have missed it in any case. 
Perhaps—nay, I will be certain of it, to lessen heart- 
ache—they went off in the night. To think of it! 
that young, tiny creature! And was it then, in the 
dark night, when the wind was blowing so furiously, 
that you were carried down—a little soft, fluffy, deli- 
cate-looking thing—to be put upon the great tumul- 
tuous sea? through mist and driving spray, with neither 
moon nor stars to light you, to toss, for the first time 
in life, on those tumbling, rough-playing waves? I, 
a grown man, was glad of all I could heap on my bed 
