AQUATIC BIRDS. 



76 



Levaillant, not far from the Cape of Good Hope, found them in 

 great numbers on a desert isle where rose the tomb of a poor Danish 

 mariner, a child of the Arctic Pole, whom Fate had led thither to die 

 among the Austral wastes, and between whom and his fatherland 

 the density of the globe intervened. Seals and penguins supplied him 

 with a numerous society; the former prostrate and lying down; the 

 latter standing erect, and mounting guard with dignity around the 

 lonely grave: all melancholy, and responding to the moans of Ocean, 

 which one might have imagined to be the wail of the dead. 



Their winter station is the Cape. In that warm African exile they 

 invest themselves with a good and solid coat of fat, which will be 

 very useful defences for them against cold and hunger. When spring 

 returns, a secret voice admonishes them that the tempestuous thaw has 

 broken and rent the sharp crystalline ice; that the blissful Polar Seas, 

 their country and their cradle, their sweet love-Eden, are open and 

 calling upon them. Impatiently they set forth; with rapid wings 

 they oar their way across five or six hundred leagues of sea, without 

 other resting-place than occasional pieces of floating ice may, for a 

 few moments, offer them. They arrive, and all is ready. A summer 

 of thirty days' duration makes them happy. 



With a grave happiness. The happiness of discovering a profound 

 tranquillity separates them from the sea where their sole element lies. 

 The season of love and incubation is, therefore, a time of fasting and 



