202 AUGUST 



on the rail, for the most part, almost like a stuffed thing. 

 How very smooth and white are the breast feathers, how 

 soft the grey of its back, and how neatly patterned the 

 black edges. The pink-lilac legs look like sticks artifi 

 cially stuck into the dressed body. But the shrewd eye, 

 where dwells the master sense of this bird, as of all other 

 birds, is acutely watchful, though its watchfulness is 

 almost wholly concerned with food. It watches your 

 hand, expecting a gift ; and the amount it must receive 

 in a day is fantastic, for it is everyone s friend. Anything 

 edible it will take from your hand without suspicion of a 

 tremor. A particularly large herring gull, with a like 

 appreciation of mankind, frequents the golf links at 

 Mullion, in Cornwall ; but this bird s eye has a crueller 

 glint, and the beak suggests an instrument of war, for it 

 will attack, and may even kill, any smaller bird that 

 comes between the wind and its avidity. Both birds are 

 as tame, for example, as the gull, so well known to the 

 British Army in the war, which lived in the courtyard of 

 the Hotel du Rhin, at Amiens. 



How much of the pleasure of the holiday-maker at the 

 seaside comes from watching the gulls. You can no more 

 stale the delight and wonder of their easy flight than the 

 restless movement of the sea itself. They make the air 

 as palpable almost as the sea. Without a stir of the wing 

 they shift their place and then plane like a boat on the 

 waves, rising on the peak and dipping to the trough. 

 Look at the companions of this static gull on the pier as 

 they swing in from the sea towards the face of Great 

 Orme s Head. Without an aiding movement, except an 

 imperceptible tilt of the body, they shoot upwards as they 

 near the cliff. The wave of air has risen steeply as it hit 

 the cliff face, and is no longer a west wind or a north wind, 

 but a Jacob s ladder running from earth towards heaven. 



