stone walls
dividing abandoned fields; the cellar of a vanished house, and a ruined
fireplace and chimney; a little enclosure, overgrown with bushes and
weeds, marking a lonely, forgotten burial-ground.

There are few gulls to be seen at this end of the island; it is a
tranquil, forsaken place where we can sit beside our fire of driftwood
and eat our broiled fish and bread, and smoke an after-dinner pipe of
peace. A grassy foot-path leads down the fields, and across a
salt-meadow, and along a high sea-wall of rocks and pebbles cast up by
the storms, and so by a rude wood-road through a forest of spruce-trees
to the higher part of the island. It rises perhaps a hundred feet or
more above the sea, with a steep shore built of huge sloping ledges of
flat rock. On the seaward point is the light-house, with the three
dwelling-houses of the keepers, all precisely alike, immaculately neat
and trim, surrounded by a long picket fence, and presenting a front of
indomitable human order and discipline to the tumultuous and unruly
ocean, which heaves away untamed and unbroken to the shores of Spain
and Brittany.

The chief keeper of the light, Captain Stanley, who has been with it
since it was first kindled twenty years ago, is also the warden of the
sea-gulls. All around us, in the air, on the green slopes of the
island, on the broad gray granite ledges, on the dancing blue waves,
his feathered flocks are scattered, and their innumerable laughter and
shrill screaming confuse the ear. The spruce-trees on the top of the
island and the eastward slopes are almost all dead; their fallen trunks
and branches and up-turned roots cover the little hillocks and hollows
in all directions. The gulls' nests are hidden away among this gray
_debris_, or in crevices among the rocks, sheltered as much as possible
from the wind and the rain.

They are not very wonderful from an architectural point of view, being
nothing more than rough little circles of dried twigs and grass matted
together, with perhaps a bit of seaweed or moss for padding in the case
of a parent with luxurious tastes. Three eggs in a nest is the rule,
and all that the average mother-gulls wants is a place where she can
hold them together and keep them warm until they are hatched. The young
birds are praecocial; they emerge from the shell with a full suit of
downy feathers, and are able to walk after a fashion, and to swim
pretty well, almost from the day of their second and compl