Page:BirdWatchingSelous.djvu/207

 beats it into foam so that it looks like the wake of a steamer, he raises only a little silvery sprinkling of spray, for he but just flips the surface of it with the tips of his quill feathers. All the while his little, upturned, fanned tail keeps waggle-waggling, but this, too, acts more like a light shuttlecock than a powerful screw. Nor does he dip so much or make such violent motions as of a mad water-dance. The cormorant's performance is strong—an epic. His is lyrical rather. No lofty genius but a pretty little minor poet is the black guillemot, and after each little water-verselet he rises pleasedly and gives his wings an applausive little shake. You might think he was clapping them—and himself."

Gargoyle idylls.—"Now I have found a nest with the bird on it, to see and watch. It was on a ledge, and just within the mouth of one of those long, narrowing, throat-like caverns into and out of which the sea with all sorts of strange, sullen noises licks like a tongue. The bird, who had seen me, continued for a long time afterwards to crane about its long neck from side to side or up and down over the nest, in doing which it had a very demoniac appearance, suggesting some evil being in its dark abode, or even the principle of evil itself. As it was impossible for me to watch it without my head being visible over the edge of the rock I was on, I collected a number of loose flat stones that lay on the turf above, and, at the cost of a good deal of time and labour, made a kind of wall or sconce with loopholes in it, through which I could look, yet be invisible. Presently the bird's mate came flying into the cavern, and wheeling up as it entered, alighted on a sloping