46 Poachers and Poaching. 



latter no larger than thrushes. These fearless 

 people of the waste' have not by any means 

 followed us from land, living, as gulls often will, 

 on the waste thrown from the vessel. They are 

 vague and casual roamers of the ocean, who 

 spying the great steamship from afar, have sailed 

 close up, to see if we are a rock or an island, 

 and will then skim away on their own free and 

 boundless business. Yonder tiny bird with 

 purple and green plumage, his little breast and 

 neck laced with silver, is distant one thousand 

 miles at this moment from a drop of fresh water, 

 and yet cares no more for the fact than did the 

 Irish squire who ' lived twelve miles from a 

 lemon.' If his wings ever grow weary it is but 

 to settle quietly on the bosom of a great billow 

 and suffer it for a time to rock and roll him amid 

 this hissing spendrift, the milky flying foam, 

 and the broken sea-lace which forms and gleams 

 and disappears again upon the dark slopes. 

 When he pleases, a stroke of the small red foot 

 and a beat of the wonderful wing launch him off 

 from the jagged edge of his billow, and he flits 

 past us at one hundred knots an hour, laughing 

 steam and canvas to scorn, and steering for some 

 nameless crag in Labrador or Fundy, or bound, 

 it may be, homeward for some island or marsh of 

 the far-away Irish coast. Marvellously expres- 

 sive of power as is our untiring engine, which all 

 day and all night throbs and pants and pulses in 



