inders that
the world is not yet entirely dead or civilized. A man that I know once
wrote a poem about them, and sent it to a magazine. It was evidently an
out-of-door poem and so the editor put it in the midsummer number,--when
you might cross the ferry a hundred times without seeing a single gull.
They do not begin to come to town until October; and it is well on into
November before their social season begins. In March and April they
begin to flit again, and by May they are all away northward, to the
inland lakes among the mountains, or to the rocky islands of the Maine
coast. Let us follow them.

II

A GULL PARADISE

In the waters south of Cape Cod, where blue-fish and other gamy surface
swimmers are found, the gulls are often useful guides to the fisherman.
When he sees a great flock of them fluttering over the water, he
suspects that the objects of his pursuit are there, feeding from below
on the squid, the shiners, or the skip-jack, on which the gulls are
feeding from above. So the fisherman sails as fast as possible in that
direction, wishing to drag his trolls through the school of fish while
they are still hungry. But in the colder waters around the island of
Mount Desert, where the blue-fish have never come and the mackerel have
gone away, the sign of the fluttering gulls does not indicate fish to
be caught, but fish which have already been caught, and which some
other fisherman is cleaning for the market as he hurries home. The
gulls follow his boat and glean from the waves behind it. They are
commentators now, not prophets.

In these blue and frigid deeps the real sport of angling is unknown.
There is instead a rather childish, but amusing, game of salt-water
grab-bag. You let down a heavy lump of lead and two big hooks baited
with clams into thirty, forty, or sixty feet of water. Then you wait
until something nudges the line. Then you give the line a quick jerk,
and pull in, hand over hand, and see what you have drawn from the
grab-bag. It may be a silly, but nutritious cod, gaping in surprise at
this curious termination of his involuntary rise in the world; or a
silvery haddock, staring at you with round, reproachful eyes; or a
pollock, handsome but worthless; or a shiny, writhing dog-fish, whose
villainy is written in every line of his degenerate, chinless face. It
may be that spiny gargoyle of the sea, a sculpin; or a soft and stupid
bake from the mud-flats. It may be any one of the grotesq