184 
A BIRD'S INQUISITIVENESS. 
All you had to do was to take them up, pull the long red feathers out 
of their stems, and set them adrift again. On Tubal you may pick up 
tropic-birds as easily as a child picks up storm- worn shells on the 
sea-shore." 
Whether they deserve a character for stupidity or not, it is certain 
that they are remarkably inquisitive; and it is this inquisitiveness 
which draws them towards a passing vessel. They want to know 
what it means, that " speck upon the boundless blue; " and hence their 
frequent wheeling flights around it, and the persistency with which 
they follow in its course. The Earl of Pembroke remarks that in their 
mode of fishing they resemble the terns ; but he noticed that they had 
a way of hovering perpendicularly, with the bill pressed against the 
breast, which he had never observed but in one other bird, the black 
and white kingfisher of the Nile. When the " Boatswain " has sighted 
his prey in this position, he turns over with indescribable dexterity, 
and goes down straight as a gannet, and up to his neck. " No farther," 
adds the Earl ; which is contrary to Mr. Bennett's statement. 
Our voyager found not only the full-grown tropic-birds, but their 
eggs and young. The former, about the size of a hen's egg, prettily 
splashed with reddish brown, and laid on the bare sand, under cover 
of a bush. The latter, handsome little creatures, about the size of a 
herring-gull, finely marked, like a falcon, with black and white, and 
with a black bill, which changes to red as the bird grows older. 
" When you find your young friend under a bush, he is ensconced in a 
small basin of coral dust, without any nest at all ; and his surroundings 
show him to be a cleanly thing. When you come upon him suddenly 
he squalls and croaks, and wabbles about, and is as disconcerted as a 
warm city man when you try to drive a new idea into him uncon- 
nected with money. But he sticks stoutly to his dusty cradle, and 
never attempts to escape ; saying plainly enough, ' My mother told 
me to stop here till she brought me my supper, and here I am going 
to sta}^' " 
With reference to two other birds of the sea, the albatross and 
the Cape pigeon, which both belong to the ocean-region we are now 
