The lesser hills, the
Bubbles, Bald Mountain, Flying Mountain, and the rest, detach
themselves one after another and stand out from their background of
green and gray. How rosy the cliffs of Otter and Seal Harbor glow in
the sunlight! How magically the great white flower of foam expands and
closes on the sapphire water as the long waves, one by one, pass over
the top of the big rock between us and Islesford! This is a bird's-eye
view: not a high-flying bird, circling away up in the sky, or perched
upon some lofty crag, as Tennyson describes the eagle:--

"Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world he stands;
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,
He watches from his mountain-walls;"

but a to-and-fro-travelling bird, keeping close to sea and shore. It is
a gull's-eye view--just as the flocks of herring gulls see it every
day, passing back and forth from their seaward nesting-place to their
favourite feeding-ground at Bar Harbor. There they go now, flapping
southward with the breeze. We will go with them to their island home,
and eat our dinner while they are digesting theirs.

Great and Little Duck Islands lie about ten miles off shore from Seal
Harbor. Their name suggests that they were once the haunt of various
kinds of sea-fowl. But the ducks have been almost, if not quite,
exterminated; and the herring gulls would probably have gone the same
way, but for the exertions of the Audubon Society, which have resulted
in the reservation of the islands as a breeding-ground under
governmental protection. It has taken a long time to awaken the
American people to the fact that the wild and beautiful creatures of
earth and air and sea are a precious part of the common inheritance,
and that their needless and heedless destruction, by pot-hunters or
plume-hunters or silly shooters who are not happy unless they are
destroying something, is a crime against the commonwealth which must be
punished or prevented. The people are not yet wide awake, but they are
beginning to get their eyes open; and the State of Maine, which was
once the Butchers' Happy Hunting Ground, is now a leader in the
enactment and enforcement of good game laws.

There is only one place on the shore of Great Duck where you can land
comfortably when the wind has any northing in it, and that is a little
cove among the rocks, below a fisherman's shanty, on the lower end of
the island. Here there are a few cleared acres; some low