104 ORNITHOLOGICAL RAMBLES. 



and Schiller's beautiful words will seem adapted to this 

 particular spot : 



" It hisses and eddies, and seethes and starts, 



As if water and fire were blending, 

 Till the spray-dashing column to heaven updarts, 



Wave after wave everlastingly sending ; 

 Never exhausted and never at rest, 

 like a new sea sprung from the old sea's breast." 



All the lowest strata, just as at Hoy Head, 

 presented one overpowering scene of stirring active 

 life, as every chink and inequality, the dark recesses 

 of its dank and humid caverns, and every rugged flag 

 or sloping block, was tenanted in a similar manner by 

 thousands of the smaller sea-fowl. Many a noisy gull 

 wheeled and screamed in mazy evolutions overhead, 

 or floated in profound tranquillity upon the silent 

 water. The large area of alternate wet and dry rock, 

 giving birth, both upon its naked face and within its 

 darksome fissures, to a luxuriant sea-growth of moist 

 and reeking weed, imparted an odour of almost fetid 

 saltness to the neighbouring air. 



Upon the very topmost ridges the naked eye could 

 just make out the breeding-places of the herring gull, 

 which I have previously described ; while stretching 

 away on either side in one long line at one particular 

 level, were two or three ledges in close proximity, on 

 which the weird spectre-looking cormorants were 



