ed almost wholly on the
latter. A naturalist, and by temper the gentlest of men, in his methods
he was a born pioneer. You can hardly imagine how cumbrous and
well-nigh hopeless a business it was in those days, not so long past, to
pursue after wild life with a camera; but a thousand disheartening
failures left him still grasping the inviolable shade, still confident
that in photography, if it could only be given with rapidity and
precision, lay the naturalist's hope. Blurred negatives were all the
spoil, and, sorry enough, we bore back after long days of tossing and
climbing among the Outer Islands; but we had the reward of living among
the birds. They filled our thoughts, our lives for the time:--great
cormorants and northern divers, flitting red-legged oyster-catchers,
shags spreading their wings to the wind and sun, sea-parrots, murrs,
razor-bills, gannets questing by ones and twos--now poised, now dropping
like plummets with a resounding splash; sandpipers and curlews dotting
the beaches, and wading; tern, common gulls, herring-gulls, and
kittiwakes, and, at nightfall, shearwaters popping from their holes and
swimming and skimming around our boat as we headed for home. And then,
the nests we discovered!--nay, the nests that at times we walked among,
picking our steps like egg-dancers!--nests boldly planted on the bare
rock ledges; nests snugly hidden among the clusters of blue thrift and
the massed sea-pinks. They bloomed everywhere, these sea-pinks; sheet
upon sheet of pale rose-colour, soon to show paler and fade before the
rosy splendours of the mesembryanthemum. But the thrift had no rival to
fear, condensing blue heaven and blue sea in the flower it lifted
against both; and to lie prone and make a frame of it for some winding
channel when the tide-rip flashed and tossed was to send the eye
plunging into blue like an Eastern diver after pearls.

But when after sunset the blue deepened to violet, always in the heart
of it glowed the crimson light upon Off Island. Night after night I
watched it from my window, and wondered what manner of people they were
who tended it, living out yonder on a rock where no grass grew, and in a
roar of tide which the inhabitants of the greater islands heard on still
days in the few inland valleys where it was possible to lose sight of
the sea. I knew that thousands of puffins bred there, and we were to
visit the rock some day; but, what with the tides and an all but
ceasel