BIRDS' NESTING SEASON 151 



rowed their dwellings in the green slope behind it, 

 must have been a race much smaller than the better-fed 

 man of the twentieth century. It was only at some 

 risk of being set fast, like a too keen fox-terrier in a 

 rabbit's hole, that a pair of shoulders of not much 

 more than average breadth could be pushed a little 

 way through some of the most roomy of the galleries. 



They, poor people, and the Norsemen who robbed 

 and exterminated them, have their successors now in 

 the Rock Pigeons, who have made a dovecote of the 

 castle, and the Falcons who prey upon them. In the 

 enclosed court lay the clean-picked bones and feathers 

 of a Pigeon killed a day or two before our visit, and 

 just inside the entrance to the staircase, in a hollow 

 under a stone, a naked nestling lay dead beside a cold 

 egg, in which was another young bird, which when the 

 mother left the nest to return no more must have been 

 within an hour or two of hatching. In the corner of 

 one of the chambers crouched a pair of young birds 

 almost ready to fly. As we climbed the stairs a second 

 pair, full grown but still uneducated, fluttered before us; 

 and as we came out on the top of the tower, a Peregrine 

 poised himself for a moment, and circling once or twice 

 without any visible movement of the wing, sailed off 

 magnificently to the north-west, probably to join his 

 mate on the Noup of Noss. 



There is a herd of Shetland ponies on Mousa. They 

 are kept for breeding purposes only, and lead a life as 

 free as the mustangs of Mayne Reid's stories. All the 

 mares, with a single exception, had, when we saw them, 



