160 EXTRACTS FROM HIS WORKS [oh. vii. 
seems now to glance toward her young a look of 
maternal affection, and again surveys the distant 
plains! Now, her few short wheelings ended, off 
she shoots, flying in a direct line towards the 
Gifford Woods, where no doubt she expects to find 
a missel thrush by the edge of the orchard, a young 
partridge beneath the hedge, a lark carolling over 
the field, or at all events some object worthy of her 
pursuit. As you watch her motions, the male, 
having shaken off his drowsiness, trimmed his 
plumes, and scratched his cheek—he could do no 
more, for he has none of those combs in his claws 
with which the philosophers tell us some birds are 
furnished for the purpose of combing their whiskers 
—springs into the air and, almost touching the tops 
of the broom and heather, the inhabitants of which 
might conceive him to be a harpy, speeds directly 
over the shoulder of the hill to search the upland 
moors. They are gone, and what remains ? Look 
around you. 
In the crimsoned east stretches out the smooth 
expanse of the German Ocean, bounded to the 
northward by the coast of Fife, toward the south 
by the shores of East Lothian. Straight before me, 
like a giant leaning on his elbow, or a volcano that 
in a single night has emerged from the deep, rises 
the rocky protuberance of the Bass, the haunt of 
thousands of gannets which, at this distance, 
however, I can perceive only with the aid of fancy. 
Beyond this, to the left of the dim Isle of May, with 
its glimmering light surmounting a range of whitened 
