ied an 
IN THE SHETLANDS 233 
to keep the wind away. I lay and thought of ship- 
wrecks as I listened to it roaring, but I never thought 
of you, flitting out to sea through it all, cradled so 
delicately on your mother’s back—if that, indeed, was 
the way of it. How could | imagine it? Even to 
watch you, as you lay warm on your cold ledge in the 
daytime, gave me the lumbago, though wrapped in 
two good plaids. But at night, and with nothing round 
you, to leave even shat shelter, to cast off from the 
sheer, horrid edge “into the empty, vast, and wander- 
ing air,” and then souse into yeasty salt water, without 
cold or chill taken, without a touch of lumbago—oh, 
what an iron constitution! You are not the lathe 
painted to look like iron; you are feathers in steel- 
work, rather, a powder-puff made out of adamant. 
But here I register a vow that I will return here, some 
day, in the height of the putting-off season, and see 
the little guillemots fly from their cliff’s cradle, or ride 
down on one cradle to another—their mother’s soft, 
warm back, and then 
In cradle of the rude, imperious surge. 
