CLASS II. AVES: ORDER 8. NATATORES. 305 



from top to bottom, with a reverberation like the discharge of a hundred cannon. And what a 

 sight followed ! They rose up from tliat mountain — the countless myriads and millions of sea- 

 birds — in a universal, overwhelming cloud that covered the whole heavens, and their cry was like 

 the cry of an alarmed nation. Up they went — millions upon millions — ascending like the smoke 

 of a furnace — countless as the sands on the sea-shore — awful, dreadful for multitude, as if the 

 whole mountain were dissolving into life and light, and with an unearthly kind of lament, took 

 up their line of march in every direction off to sea! The sight startled the people on board the 

 steamer, who had often witnessed it before, and for some minutes there ensued a general silence. 

 For our own part, we were quite amazed and overawed at the spectacle. We had seen nothing 

 like it ever before. We had seen White Mountain Notches and Niagara Falls, in our own land, 

 and the vastness of the wide and deep ocean, which was then separating us from it. We had 

 seen something of art's magnificence in the old world, 'its cloud-capt towers, its gorgeous palaces 

 and solemn temples ;' but we had never witnessed sublimity to be compared to that rising of sea- 

 birds from Ailsa Craig. They were of countless varieties, in kind and size, from the largest goose 

 to the smallest marsh-bird — and of every conceivable variety of dismal note. Off they moved, in 

 wild and alarmed rout, like a people going into exile — filling the air, far and wide, with their re- 

 proachful lament at the wanton cruelty that had broken them up and driven them into captivity. 

 We really felt remorse at it, and the thought might have occurred to us, how easy it would have 

 been for them, if they had known that the little smoking speck that was laboring along the sea- 

 surface beneath them, had been the cause of their banishment, to have settled down upon it and 

 ino-ulfed it out of sio-ht forever. 



"We felt astonished that we had never before heard of this wonderful haunt of sea-fowl, and 

 that no one had ever tvrittcn a book upon if. It struck us as really one of ' the wonders of the 

 world.' And not us alone ; others, not at all given to the marvelous, declared that it surpassed 

 every thing they had ever before witnessed. We supposed the mountain must have been quite 

 deserted, from the myriads that had flown away ; but lifting the glass to it, as we were leaving 

 its border, we were appalled to find it still alive with the myriads left behind. They kept leaving 

 and leaving, until our steamer had got far on beyond the Craig, and till we could no longer dis- 

 cern their departure with the telescope ; and it was miles off into the dusky Irish Sea, before we 

 saw the ebbing of their miglity movement, and that they were beginning to return. We felt re- 

 lieved to sec them going back. It liad scarcely occurred tons, in our surprise, that they were not 

 leaving their native cliffs forever. Slowly and sadly they seemed to return, while the eye sought 

 in vain to ken the outskirts of their mighty caravan. And Ailsa Craig had sunk far into our 

 rear, and quite sensibly diminished in the distance, before the rearmost of the feathered host had 

 disappeared from our sight." 



And this is but one of hundreds, nay, of thousands, of rocky recesses along the interminable 

 boundaries of the ocean, filled with myriads of sea-fowl. Numerous islands among the Hebrides; 

 others to the north — the Shetlands and Orkneys ; the high beetling cliffs of North America, from 

 Nova Scotia to Greenland ; the southern coasts of Africa ; the bleak dizzy craigs around Cape 

 Horn ; the lofty cliffs that hang frowning over the sea on either side of Behring's Straits — breast- 

 ing the shock of the Pacific that has sundered, and still sunders the two continents ; these, and 

 a multitude of other wild rocky ledges, are, like Ailsa rock, the abodes of millions upon millions 

 of sea-fowl : geese of many kinds, ducks, guillemots, grebes, divers, puffins, sheer-waters, terns, 

 gulls, petrels, cormorants, frigate-birds and pelicans. And beside all this, there is no part of the 

 ocean, however distant from the land, where some species are not found ; in many places, espe- 

 cially in high northern latitudes, the face of the waters is covered with them. What is loneliness 

 and desolation to man, is peace and abundance to them. Often in crossing the cold and tumultu- 

 ous waters that roll to the north and east of the Grand Banks, have we seen whole troops of sea- 

 fowl, tossing on the sea, yet screaming with delight, and seeming to overflow with enjoyment.* 



* Nor are the swimming birds the only ones that traverse the great waters. A graphic writer has furnished us 

 with a sketch of the Visitants of Ships at Sea, which is too amusing and too instructive to be omitted. We therefore 

 give it in a note : 



" All persons who have made long voyages, especially in luud-locked seas and on board of sailing-vessels, must 



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