44 The Birds of the 



with surroundings such as ours had been since we 

 started in the morning, slips by very quickly. The 

 Megstone Rocks lay a mile or two off, and we could 

 not miss them. If we were to catch the night 

 express at Belford, either dinner or the ruins must 

 be sacrificed, and to have hesitated in our choice 

 would have been an insult to the keen air of 

 Northumberland. 



The " Megstones " are bare volcanic rocks, with no 

 vegetation on them but the seaweeds below high- 

 water mark and an occasional patch of lichen. The 

 chief rock is a breeding-place of cormorants, no other 

 birds apparently venturing near it. A ship had a few 

 weeks before our visit been wrecked on the rock. 

 The solitude had been for some time disturbed, and 

 we were warned not to expect to see much, but as we 

 neared the rock we saw heads on snake-like necks 

 stretched up here and there, and as we watched 

 our opportunity to spring from the boat a black 

 cloud of cormorants rose together within a few feet 

 of us. 



Of the many allusions to birds to be found in 

 Milton's poems, there is scarcely one which is not 

 more suggestive of the study than of the open air. 

 But there is an exception. The idea that Satan 

 when he first broke into Paradise, and wished to look 

 round him unobserved, 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 



