238 THE BIRD WATCHER 
affects, or for the greager part of the time. He seems 
to be a much less lazy sort of seal than the common 
kind. Iam not quite sure why he went away, as he 
did for an hour, from about three. I thought at the 
time I had alarmed him, for although I lay flat upon 
a huge slanting rock, with my head not projecting 
beyond the edge, he seemed to look full at me with 
a questioning countenance, and then till four o'clock 
the pool that had known him knew him no more. 
Whilst he was gone I, with a lot of labour, brought 
a number of flat stones from the chaos of rocks and 
boulders which makes the beach here, and with these 
I made a sort of loopholed wall, through and from 
behind which I could look, as I had done before to 
watch the shags on my island. That, by the way, was 
still standing when I got there again after two years. 
I wonder how long this other may remain on this 
most lonely shore, to which no one, to judge by all 
appearances, ever comes down, from one year’s end to 
another. Long may it be so! 
Just before beginning my masonry I had an in- 
teresting experience. From a crevice in the pilings of 
these huge black boulders that lie strewn in wild con- 
fusion between the base of the cliffs and the sea — 
making the gloomy beach—from amongst these, I say, 
and within about three steps of me, forth hopped a 
little wren, and began immediately to procure food in 
the more or less near neighbourhood of my boots. 
The boulders had hitherto seemed bare enough, but 
wherever the wren went numbers of little hopping 
