A NATIVE NATURALIST 249 



we are most familiar with, which come as a great sur- 

 prise, and I gave an account of one an incident I wit- 

 nessed of a rock-pipit which, caught by a violent gust 

 of wind just at the moment when its wings being set 

 for the gliding descent to earth could not be used to 

 resist the current, was blown away into the midst 

 of a band of hovering herring gulls and very nearly 

 lost its life. One knows that one will never witness 

 just such an incident again, but there will be others 

 equally unexpected and strange for the watcher. In 

 the course of this book I have related a few : one of 

 a gannet falling from a great height like a stone into 

 the sea just by the side of a herring gull floating on 

 the surface, and one of a fox, standing like a carved 

 figure on a big rock, savagely attacked by a raven and 

 refusing to be driven from its stand. 



Here I cannot resist the temptation to introduce 

 an incident of this kind, but far more wonderful than 

 any one I have related in this or any other book, 

 which was witnessed not by a naturalist but an artist, 

 my friend Mr. R. H. Carter, of the Land's End. He 

 was with his friend, the late Rev. F. C. Jackson, Rector 

 of Stanmore, who used to take his holidays in West 

 Cornwall and was himself something of an artist. 

 They were sketching one day on the huge cliffs of 

 Tol-Pedn-Penwith, near the Land's End, when Mr. 

 Carter noticed that some animal had been recently 

 scratching the earth at the foot of a huge pile of 

 rocks near where he was sitting. There was a large 

 hollow place under the rock into which one could see, 

 as there was an opening on a level with the ground 



