ral History of strange
sea-fowl than at Rodondo. It is the aviary of Ocean. Birds light here
which never touched mast or tree; hermit-birds, which ever fly alone;
cloud-birds, familiar with unpierced zones of air.

Let us first glance low down to the lowermost shelf of all, which is the
widest, too, and but a little space from high-water mark. What
outlandish beings are these? Erect as men, but hardly as symmetrical,
they stand all round the rock like sculptured caryatides, supporting the
next range of eaves above. Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen; their
bills short; their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their
sides are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor
fowl is the penguin; as an edible, pertaining neither to Carnival nor
Lent; without exception the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet
discovered by man. Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed
possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in
none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops. As if
ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at
the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan, and on the abased
sea-story of Rodondo.

But look, what are yon wobegone regiments drawn up on the next shelf
above? what rank and file of large strange fowl? what sea Friars of
Orders Gray? Pelicans. Their elongated bills, and heavy leathern pouches
suspended thereto, give them the most lugubrious expression. A pensive
race, they stand for hours together without motion. Their dull, ashy
plumage imparts an aspect as if they had been powdered over with
cinders. A penitential bird, indeed, fitly haunting the shores of the
clinkered Encantadas, whereon tormented Job himself might have well sat
down and scraped himself with potsherds.

Higher up now we mark the gony, or gray albatross, anomalously so
called, an unsightly unpoetic bird, unlike its storied kinsman, which is
the snow-white ghost of the haunted Capes of Hope and Horn.

As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower
serially disposed in order of their magnitude:--gannets, black and
speckled haglets, jays, sea-hens, sperm-whale-birds, gulls of all
varieties:--thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in
senatorial array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly
in a great piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary's chicken
sounds his co