boats left unattended by the men.

They had thrown a canvas over the fish, but this the gulls soon succeeded in pulling aside; then those overhead converging poured down in the form of a white column, and the boat was covered from stem to stern with a mass of birds madly fighting for the herrings. The men in other boats close by looked on and laughed; by and by they began shouting, but this had no effect, and the struggling and feasting went on until the master of the boat returned and scared them off. He said afterwards that they had devoured half his catch, yet the men who had been standing by looking on had made no real attempt to save the fish.

The gulls know their friends very well; with the man in sea-boots and oilskins they are tamer than any domestic bird; they will take food from his hands and love to settle to rest on the boats and to sit perched like swallows on the mast top. They have not the same confidence towards strangers, and they positively dislike small boys. When boys appear they fly away to a distance. One evening, the men being out of sight, I found three urchins amusing themselves by throwing stones at a few small gulls flying about the sand in search of scraps. "What would you get," I asked them, "if one of the men caught you stoning the gulls?" "Oh!" cried the biggest of the three, drawing his head down between his shoulders in a most expressive way, "we'd get our ears well cuffed."

"Very well," I said, "I'm here in their place to-day to look after the birds." In a moment they dropped their stones and taking to their heels vanished in a neighbouring court.

Yet these very boys in a few years' time, when they will be in the boats too, will have the same feeling as the men, and be ready to inflict the severest punishment on any youngster they may catch throwing a pebble at one of their sacred birds!

Original

One day I caught sight of a large ivory-white gull of an unknown species sitting on the water some distance from the shore, and was very anxious to see more of this bird. Two or three days later I was with an artist friend in his studio, and was standing at the window which looks upon a sandy cove at the back of the town. By and by a wave of the incoming tide threw up a dead dogfish about three feet long on the white sand within fifty yards of the window. Scarcely was the fish left by the retiring water before a big white-winged gull dropped down upon it—the very bird I had been hoping to encounter again! There it remained, trying to tear a hole in the tough skin, fully five minutes before the returning water took the fish away, so that I had a good chance of examining it through a binocular. It was considerably bigger than the herring gull, with a much more formidable beak and altogether a bolder appearance, and the entire plumage was of a chalky white. It was a Glaucous gull—the famous Burgomaster of the Arctic Sea, probably a female in immature plumage. In a few moments other gulls dropped down to get a bite—three herring and one black-backed gull with some smaller gulls—but they were not allowed to taste the fish. When one attempted to come near it the white gull looked fixedly at him a couple of moments, then drawing in its head suddenly tipped its beak upwards—an expressive gull gesture corresponding to the snarl of a dog when he is feeding and other dogs approach him. It produced a marked effect on the other gulls; perhaps the Burgomaster, a rare visitor to our seas, was known, from hearsay, to them as a great tyrant.

Talking of this noble stranger to one of the fishermen, I remarked that if a bird collector happened to be about he would certainly have that bird even if compelled to fire into the whole crowd of gulls to kill it. "Then," he returned, "perhaps our men would kill him!"

The curious point is that this feeling should exist and be so strong in a people who have little or no regard for birds generally. The most religious of men, they are at the same time the least humane. The gull they tell you is the fisherman's friend; but other sea-birds, which he kills without compunction—the gannet, for instance—are useful to him in the same way as the gull. They also say that the gulls keep the harbour sweet and clean; an explanation probably invented for them by some stranger within their gates. The fact is, they cherish an affection for the gulls, though they refuse to confess it, and, being what they are by race, this feeling has acquired the character of a superstition. To injure a gull wilfully is to invite disaster. It may be that the origin of the feeling is simply the fact that gulls gather in vociferous crowds round the boats and in the harbour when the fishing has prospered, and in this way become associated in the fisherman's mind with all those agreeable ideas or images and emotions connected with a good catch—smiles and cheerful words of greeting in the home, with food in abundance, money for the rent and for needed clothes and other good things for the little ones.

On the other hand we may have here a survival of an older superstition, a notion that gulls are in some degree supernatural beings, perhaps drowned mariners and fishermen returned in bird forms to haunt their ancient homes and associate with their human fellow-creatures. The feeling is certainly very strong: I was told that some of the fishermen even in their times of greatest scarcity will always manage at mealtime to put a few crusts and scraps of food into their pockets to throw to the gulls in the harbour.

Original

From all this it might appear that the gulls at St. Ives are having an exceedingly good time, but they are not wholly happy—not happy every day, as they very soon let me know. The fishermen, like the Cornish people generally, are strict Sabbatarians, and from Friday night or Saturday morning, when the boats come in, they do not go out again until the following Monday evening. In a neighbouring fishing village the boats are taken out at the stroke of twelve on Sunday night. The St. Ives men do not like to run it so fine, and the gulls are never able to understand this long break in the fishing. On the Saturday, after feeding, they retire to the sea and the rocks, where they pass the day comfortably enough, sitting with beaks to the wind and digesting a plentiful meal. On Sunday morning they congregate in the harbour with empty stomachs only to find the boats lying empty and idle and all the men away; they do not like it, but they put up with it, and by and by loiter off to pick up what they can for themselves, or to wait patiently on the sea and the rocks, through another long twenty-four hours. On Monday morning they are very hungry indeed, and come in with stomachs that scream for food. They come in their thousands, and still nothing for them—the boats lying empty and idle, the men still at home in bed and no movement in the harbour! They cannot and they will not endure it. Then begins a tremendous demonstration of the unemployed. On my first Monday I was roused from slumber before daylight by the uproar. It was not now that tempest and tangle of broken, squealing and grinding metallic noises emitted by the big gulls when they are in numbers fighting over their food, it was the loud long wailing call of the bird, incessantly repeated, a thousand wailing like one, and at intervals the dreary laughter-like chorus of short reiterated cries; then again the insistent wailing calls. When it became light they could be seen as a white cloud hanging over the harbour, the birds