THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 
151 
the finder some weeks to get over the sight. Perhaps 
they were man and wife, and whom God had joined the 
ocean currents had not put asunder. Yet by what slight 
accidents at first may they have been associated in their 
drifting. Some of the bodies of those passengers were 
picked up far out at sea, boxed up and sunk; some 
brought ashore and buried. There are more consequen¬ 
ces to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice. The 
Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores, or 
drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where 
time and the elements will write new riddles with their 
bones. — But to return to land again. 
In this bank, above the clay, I counted in the summer, 
two hundred holes of the Bank Swallow within a space 
six rods long, and there were at least one thousand old 
birds within three times that distance, twittering over the 
surf. I had never associated them in my thoughts with 
the beach before. One little boy who had been a-birds- 
nesting had got eighty swallows’ eggs for his share ! 
Tell it not to the Humane Society. There were many 
young birds on the clay beneath, which had tumbled out 
and died. Also there were many Crow-blackbirds hop¬ 
ping about in the dry fields, and the Upland Plover were 
breeding close by the light-house. The keeper had once 
cut off one’s wing while mowing, as she sat on her eggs 
there. This is also a favorite resort for gunners in the 
fall to shoot the Golden Plover. As around the shores of 
a pond are seen devil’s-needles, butterflies, &c., so here, 
to my surprise, I saw at the same season great devil’s- 
needles of a size proportionably larger, or nearly as big 
as my finger, incessantly coasting up and down the edge 
of the bank, and butterflies also were hovering over it, 
and I never saw so many dorr-bugs and beetles of various 
