f course the angels are much larger, and very much more
particular about what they eat. Isn't it queer that all the gulls have
eyes just alike--black and shiny and round, just like little
shoe-buttons? How funnily they swim! They sit right down on the water
as if it wasn't wet. Don't you wish you could do that? Look how they
tuck up their pinky feet under them when they fly, and how they turn
their heads from side to side, looking for something good to eat. See,
there's a great big flock all together in the water, over yonder, must
be a thousand hundred. Now they all fly up at once, like when you tear
a newspaper into little scraps and throw a handful out of the window.
Where do you suppose they go at night? Perhaps they sleep on the water.
That must be fun! Do they have gulls in Ireland, Biddy, and are all
their eyes black and shiny?"

"Sure!" says Biddy. "An' they do be a hundred toimes bigger an' foiner
than these wans. The feathers o' thim shoines in the sun loike silver
and gowld, an' their oyes is loike jools, an' they do be floying
fasther then the ships can sail. If ye was only seein' some o' thim
rale Oirish gulls, ye'd think no more o' these little wans!"

This increases your determination to go to the marvellous green island
some day; but it does not in the least diminish your admiration for the
gulls of Manhattan. In the summer, when you go to the seaside and watch
the

"Gray spirits of the sea and of the shore"

sailing over the white beach or floating on the blue waves of the
unsullied ocean, you wonder whether these country gulls are happier
than the city gulls. That they are different you are sure, and also
that they must have less variety in their diet, hardly any banana-skins
and orange-peel at all. But then they have more fish, and probably more
fun in catching them.

These are memories of old times--the ancient days before the Great
Invasion of the English Sparrows--the good old days when orioles and
robins still built their nests in Brooklyn trees, and Brooklyn streets
still resounded to the musical cries of the hucksters: "Radishees!
_new_ radishees!" or "Ole clo' an' bottles! any _ole_ clo' to sell!" or
"Shad O! _fre-e-sh_ shad!" In that golden age we played football around
the old farmhouse on Montague Terrace, coasted down the hill to Fulton
Ferry, and made an occasional expedition to Manhattan to observe the
strange wigwams and wild goats of the tribe of squatters who inhabited
the ro