The Heermann Gull 
Conclave of An¬ 
cient Loafers, the 
sun-warmed, 
surf-soothed, pel¬ 
ican-fed concat¬ 
enation of incor¬ 
rigible indolents. 
“The night is for 
sleep and the day 
is for rest,” says 
the H e e r m a n n 
Gull, who, being 
a Mexican (in 
spite of his Ger¬ 
man name, which 
is no fault of his), 
knows something 
of Spanish prov¬ 
erbs. 
It is permit¬ 
ted to loaf, in the 
Sou t h 1 and ,—to 
loaf and to invite 
one’s soul. The 
. r , Taken in California Photo by W. L. Finley 
bwift does not heermann gulls, adults and immature 
see it all, nor yet 
Jenny Wren, always a-flutter. Who but a Heermann Gull, sitting 
tranquil on a timber hard by, could have shared such a vision of beauty 
as came to me once on a Redondo pier! Gazing northward, we viewed 
the breakers lengthwise, as they broke under a burning sun upon a perfect 
shore. There was a stiff breeze outside, so that the billow, fleeing under 
the lash of its master, suddenly encountered an area of immovable air. 
A sheet of spray would be torn from the crest of the incoming comber, 
and this would flash into a splendor of prismatic light. And the spectacle 
was more beautiful than that of a mere rainbow, for this Triton’s crest 
would exhibit only one color at a time, a single hue of the immortal seven, 
raised to some electric shade of diaphanous brilliancy. Moreover, the 
illuminated mist changed color by sudden leaps in its shoreward progress, 
as though it were traversing the field of some heavenly spotlight, the 
defractive area of a prism de luxe, so large that it had to be served up to 
the human eye on the instalment plan. The commonest shade I caught 
was a lumiere green, or viridine, an instant vision of budding springtime 
1429 
