fresh class of visitors, which must have arrived with the new
year, for they had not been there when he had previously ascended the
cliff.

Eric was too much taken up with looking for seals to notice them, for he
certainly never mentioned them on his return below to the hut; and, so,
Fritz was doubly surprised now at seeing them.

These newcomers were the wandering albatross--the "Diomedia exulans," as
naturalists term it--which sailors believe to float constantly in the
upper air, never alighting on land or sea, but living perpetually on the
wing!

Eric was firmly convinced of this from what he had been told when on
board the _Pilot's Bride_; but Fritz, of course, expressed doubts of the
bird having any such fabulous existence when it was pointed out to him
while illustrating "flight without motion," as its graceful movement
through the air might be described. Now, he had ocular demonstration of
the fact that the albatross not only rests its weary feet on solid earth
sometimes, but that it also builds a nest, and, marvellous to relate,
actually lays eggs!

No sooner had Fritz set foot on the plateau, after a weary climb up the
toilsome staircase which the tussock-grass and irregularities of the
cliff afforded, than he startled one of these birds. It was straddling
on the ground in a funny fashion over a little heap of rubbish, as the
pile appeared to him. The albatross was quite in the open part of the
tableland, and the reason why it selected such a spot for its resting-
place, instead of amid the brushwood and tussock-grass thickets that
spread over the plateau, was apparent at once when the bird was
disturbed; for, it had to take a short run along the bare ground before
it could get its pinions thoroughly inflated and rise in the air. Had
it been amidst the trees or long grass, Fritz would have been able to
approach it and knock it over before it could have sought safety in
flight, on account of its long wings requiring a wide space for their
expansion.

On proceeding to the little heap of rubbish, as Fritz thought it, from
which the albatross had risen, he found it to be a nest. This was
built, like that of an ostrich, about a foot high from the surface of
the ground, on the exterior side, and three feet or so in diameter;
while the interior was constructed of grass and pieces of stick woven
together with clay. There was one large egg in the centre of this nest,
a little bigger than that of a swan and