protect them, and a lighthouse to show them the way; and you and I,
perhaps, shall go some day to the Allalonestone to the great summer
sea-fair, and dredge strange creatures such as man never saw before; and
we shall hear the sailors boast that it is not the worst jewel in Queen
Victoria's crown, for there are eighty miles of codbank, and food for
all the poor folk in the land. That is what Tom will see, and perhaps
you and I shall see it too. And then we shall not be sorry because we
cannot get a Gairfowl to stuff, much less find gairfowl enough to drive
them into stone pens and slaughter them, as the old Norsemen did, or
drive them on board along a plank till the ship was victualled with
them, as the old English and French rovers used to do, of whom dear old
Hakluyt tells: but we shall remember what Mr. Tennyson says: how

"_The old order changeth, giving place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways._"

And now Tom was all agog to start for Shiny Wall; but the petrels said
no. They must go first to Allfowlsness, and wait there for the great
gathering of all the sea-birds, before they start for their summer
breeding-places far away in the Northern Isles; and there they would be
sure to find some birds which were going to Shiny Wall: but where
Allfowlsness was, he must promise never to tell, lest men should go
there and shoot the birds, and stuff them, and put them into stupid
museums, instead of leaving them to play and breed and work in Mother
Carey's water-garden, where they ought to be.

So where Allfowlsness is nobody must know; and all that is to be said
about it is, that Tom waited there many days; and as he waited, he saw a
very curious sight. On the rabbit burrows on the shore there gathered
hundreds and hundreds of hoodie-crows, such as you see in
Cambridgeshire. And they made such a noise, that Tom came on shore and
went up to see what was the matter.

And there he found them holding their great caucus, which they hold
every year in the North; and all their stump-orators were speechifying;
and for a tribune, the speaker stood on an old sheep's skull.

And they cawed and cawed, and boasted of all the clever things they had
done; how many lambs' eyes they had picked out, and how many dead
bullocks they had eaten, and how many young grouse they had swallowed
whole, and how many grouse-eggs they had flown away with, stuck on the
point of their bills, which is the hoodie-crow