THE BIRDS OF THE OUTER FARNES 129 



an exception. The idea that Satan when he first 

 broke into Paradise, and wished to look round him un- 

 observed, got on to the Tree of Life, and there ' sat like a 

 Cormorant devising death/ must have been taken first- 

 hand from Nature, stored up, perhaps, for future use in 

 the days when the poet, on leaving Cambridge, with 

 eyes not yet 'with dim suffusion veiled,' made his 

 voyage to the Continent. There is something diabolical 

 in the pitiless cold glitter of the green eye over the long 

 hooked beak, from which the most slippery fish, once 

 seized, has no chance of escape, and the distinctly 

 sulphureous smell of its haunts is in keeping with the 

 look of the bird. 



The Cormorant has for some wise reason (perhaps to 

 help its rapid digestion, or perhaps to neutralise to some 

 extent the smell of stinking fish if the latter is the 

 intention the work is very poorly done) been gifted with 

 an extraordinary power of secreting lime. The entire 

 surface of the Megstones for some distance round the 

 nests of which we counted ninety-three, almost all 

 with eggs in looked as if it had been freshly white- 

 washed. The eggs are long and narrow, without much 

 difference between the two ends, and if held up to the 

 light and looked at from the inside through a hole are 

 beautiful, many of them being as green as an emerald, 

 or as the eye of the bird itself. But seen from the 

 outside they look like eggs which a boy has begun to 

 cut out of a lump of chalk, and left only half finished, 

 irregular blotches of rough lime sticking out on many 

 of them. 



