d inlet and sandbar and heather-covered hills, and,
with the wind, whipped the sea into spume like an egg-whisk--came he,
the storm pirate.

A guillemot--you know the guillemot, the fish-hunter, who flies under
the waters more easily than she flies the air above the waters--had
risen, and was making inshore with a full catch, when the squall caught
her without warning. For a little she faced it, her wings whirring
madly, her body suspended in mid-air, but she not making headway one
inch against the sudden fury of a forty-mile-an-hour wind. Then, since
she could no longer see the shore, which was blotted out with hissing
rain, she turned and ran down-wind, like a drawn streak, to the lee of
a big stack of rock.

The next that was seen of her, she was heading out to sea at top speed,
in wake of the rain-shower and the squall, which had passed as suddenly
as it had come; and behind her, pursuing her with a relentless fury
that made one gasp, shot another and a strange bird-shape. Its lines
were the lines of the true pirate; its wings long and sharp-cut; its
beak wickedly hooked at the tip; its claws curved, for no gentle
purpose, at the end of its webbed feet; its eye fierce and haughty; its
uniform the color of the very stormcloud that had just passed--dun and
smoked cream below, and sooty above. True, he was not big, being only
twenty-one inches--two inches less than the herring-gull. But what is
size, anyway? It was the fire that counted, the ferocity, the "devil,"
the armament, and the appalling speed. Just as a professional boxer of
any size can lay out any mere hulking hooligan, so this bird carried
about him the stamp of the professional fighter that could lay out
anything there in that scene that he chose--almost.

The guillemot flew as never in all her life had she flown before, and
every known artifice of dodging she had heard of she tried, and--it all
failed. The terrible new bird gained all the time steadily, following
her as if towed by an invisible string, till at last he was above her,
his wonderful wild scream was ringing in her ears, his cruel eyes
glaring into hers, his beak snapping in her very face, his claws
a-clutch.

No, thank you. In sheer terror she opened her beak and dropped her
fish. It fell like a column of silver, and in a flash her pursuer was
gone--nay, was not gone; had turned, rather, into a second column, a
sooty one, falling like a thunderbolt, till he overtook even the
fa