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 np from that 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 Niao-ara 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, w^ith 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 
ingulfed it out of sight forever. 
" We felt astonished that we had never before heard of this wonderful haunt of sea-fowl, and 
that no one had ever loritten a book upon it. 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 leavino; 
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 otf into the dusky Irish Sea, before avo 
saw the ebbing of their mighty movement, and that they were beginning to return. We felt re- 
lieved to see them going back. It had scarcely occurred to us, in our surprise, that they were noi 
leaving their native clifts 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 dig's of North America, from 
Nova Scotia to Greenland; the southern coasts of iVfrica; 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 tliis, there is no part of the 
ocean, however distant from the land, where some species arc not found ; in many places, espe- 
cially in high northern latitudes, the face of the waters is covered with them. AVhat 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^ 
\vith a sketch of the Visitants of Skips 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 land-locked seas and on board of sailing-vessels, must 
YoL. 11—39 
