THE BIKDS OF THE OUTER FARNES 117 



statement the truth of which we were happily unable 

 to test for ourselves ; the two ' Wide-opens ' ; the ' Scar 

 Cars ' ; and four or five others with names as uncouth, 

 curruptions most of them of Anglo-Saxon l descriptive 

 titles. 



Terns and Gulls had been from the time we started 

 hovering round us singly or in twos and threes, and an 

 occasional Guillemot or Puffin had dived out of the way 

 of the boat or risen with trailing splash, and the sharp 

 quick beat which is characteristic of the flight of short- 

 winged birds ; but it was not until we had been afloat 

 for an hour or so, and were nearing the Brownsman, our 

 first landing-place, with the Crumstone and Fang on 

 our right, that we had any taste of what was to come. 



The whitewashed tops of the black basaltic rocks 

 which faced us shone in the sunshine, and through a 

 glass we could see they were lined, without a gap, with 

 motionless figures, looking in the distance like an army 

 of dwarfs, in black, with white facings, drawn up in 

 review order to receive us. As we pulled into a little 

 bay, hidden from us until we rounded a corner by the 

 Gun Rock, we found ourselves the centre of a startled 

 screaming multitude of Puffins, Gulls, and Terns, and a 

 few minutes later ran the boat aground, and landed on 

 the slippery rocks. 



In early times the knowledge that the birds which 



1 A table, giving in parallel columns the names in the forms in 

 which they appear in records stretching back seven or eight hundred 

 years at least, will be found, with much interesting information on 

 other matters, in a monograph on the Fame Islands by Mr. George 

 Tate, published in 1857 by the Berwickshire Naturalists' Society. 



