Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/435

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fantastically with white splotches of guano, and celebrated as a home for the sea-birds, a veritable basaltic dike, eaten into by time and weathering, and furnishing innumerable nooks and ledges for the great population it harbored.

Desperate and vain efforts to get it to "go off" involved the captain and the engineer in savage denunciations of a small brass cannon, whose thunders were to awaken the sleeping (or dozing) inhabitants of this mural metropolis. When at last it sputtered its salute, a solitary bird rose jeeringly in the air, and the show was over.

Now we were crossing the Breitfiord (the broad fiord) a vast bay, sprinkled with stumps of rock in chains of islets, and darkening ominously under gathering wind-clouds, whose first puffs began to rumple and whiten the wide expanse. Then came a marine idyll, a little grass-covered island with rocky reefs and walls, and its upland quaintly decorated with a little village and small farm houses, whose roofs were white with flowering shepherd's purse and wild mustard, shooting up most naturally from the turf gables. The men and women were out harvesting the hay, and the pictorial charm of everything was