354 Cape Pigeons and Whale Birds 



pretty wings, and appeared content to remain. At 

 the first I took them for terns, but remembered their 

 flight and also their voices, which, instead of being 

 sharp and penetrating Hke the cry of a tern, were soft 

 and appealing ; to one's imagination they were de- 

 precating being alive at all. And then to my great 

 interest they began to feed. Mincingly, delicately, 

 they pattered about the sand near the sea-margin, 

 prying with the fine points of their beaks into crannies, 

 evidently finding much food of some sort, and that 

 greatly to their taste. 



For an hour I lay and watched them until, with a 

 hurried scampering together, they rose in a little cloud 

 and swept away out to sea. It was a shipmate of 

 mine who, strolling leisurely along beachward, had 

 startled them, for which I felt I could willingly have 

 flung a stone at him. As soon as he saw me he asked 

 if I had seen the birds, calling them by the correct 

 whaler's name, Whale Birds, and when I grunted 

 assent he inflicted upon me a foolish tedious yarn of 

 there being something supernatural about Whale 

 Birds. That they never ate and never rested because 

 they had no feet, and other skittles of the kind. To 

 which I replied that he might, had he used his eyes, 

 have seen them both eating and walking a few minutes 

 ago, and so have been able to enjoy the great pleasure 

 of putting anybody right upon the subject who came 

 to him with such a story. But he did not seem to see 

 any advantage in that. 



There can be no question about the right of the 

 Whale Bird to be called one of the Deep Sea People 

 proper, that is to say, as much so as the albatross or 

 stormy petrel, because it inhabits precisely the same 

 regions as they do, although not so frequently seen. 

 But there is a certain amount of mystery attaching to 



