hobgoblins straight from an evil dream, they could
not, in that immense, grim setting, have been much more impressive.

The great black-backed gull said no more, but wheeled on as if nothing
had happened.

The eagle said nothing, and tried to beat on as if nothing had
happened, too. He did not succeed, for the ravens who had been
addressing him most particularly soon addressed themselves personally
to him; and before he knew just how it all came about, they had
summoned a quite amazing and unexpected aerial acrobatic power, and
were shooting and diving, striking and flapping, about his regal head
in a manner that even _he_ could not pretend any longer to ignore. No
one, not even a king of all the birds, feels comfortable under the
imminent possibility of losing an eye--and such a haughty, wonderful
eye, too. Nor did the eagle. And he showed it. One presumes he might
have abolished the pair--one or both--but the eagle never let on what
he presumed. What he _knew_ was that he had nothing to gain in a fight
with such super-hooligans, and everything to lose, for one wound only
might mean a dead eagle _via_ starvation and a dead raven--what was a
dead raven worth, anyway, to him, or anybody else?

Therefore the eagle changed his mind about continuing his course, which
would have taken him above the ravens' nest. He did it grandly, and
without giving the impression that the ravens had anything to do with
it--he could have squeezed the life out of them with one awful
handshake, if his heart had been as big as his claws. But they had
something to do with it. And they knew it. So did Cob, who laughed
again, hoarsely and as one appreciating a joke, while he wheeled and
wheeled over the following waves, seeing all things and never appearing
to see anything.

Then at last, when the king of all the birds had sunk, like a speck of
floating burnt paper, away over the far, white-mantled hills, the
ravens suddenly evaporated into nowhere. Probably no one had seen them
go except Cob, and Cob was by now a lonely, dwindling speck away over
the restless ocean. Then he was not. He was coming back, swinging
along with great, easy, shallow half-flaps, so sublimely lazy that he
seemed merely to swim through the gale. But he covered distance; there
was speed as well as majesty in his flight, for all that.

In a very short time he was above the cliffs, silent, sinister, almost
stealthy. One of the ravens came back suddenly, di