IN THE SHETLANDS 243 
peculiar feature, is much diminished, and the leaf-like 
shape is also lost since the mandibles diverge more 
and more widely towards the tips, like a real pair of 
scissors. Thus the bird itself, since the beak is so 
salient a part of it, suddenly loses its characteristic 
appearance. 
Marvellous is this beak, and indeed, as far as its 
appearance is concerned, it exists now wholly and 
solely for courting and nuptial purposes, being put on 
each spring before the breeding season commences, 
like the false nose in a pantomime, which, though not 
so artistic and without the same justification for its 
employment, seems equally a necessity to the esthetic 
susceptibilities of a British audience.’ It reminds 
one something of the bill of a toucan, much abridged 
—beginning, as it were, from near the tip—and as 
far as it goes it is perhaps even more wonderful, for 
not only is it brilliant with rose-red, lemon-yellow, 
and bright bluish-grey, but the lines of colour corre- 
spond to alternate ridges and furrows running down 
the length of it, which give it a fine embossed 
appearance, as though both the sculptor and painter 
had exercised their art upon it. The funny little 
orange-vermilion legs are more brilliant even than the 
bill, but they are cruder. You do not think of a real 
artist in their case, only of a clever artisan with 
a paint-pot, who, employed by the other, has taken 
1 No wonder, when such a play 23 Tée Palace of Track 23 played here by refined 
amateurs before the cultured and cultivated, is thought to require one—and very 
like a puffin’s, too, it w2s, before it began to melt. 
