e
still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth
from a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and levelled those bristling,
rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage. The
summits exist no longer where the labbes and the skua gulls used to
flock together, soaring, like the envious, to sully high places. In vain
might you seek the tall monolith called Godolphin, an old British word,
signifying "white eagle." In summer you may still gather on those
surfaces, pierced and perforated like a sponge, rosemary, pennyroyal,
wild hyssop, and sea-fennel which when infused makes a good cordial, and
that herb full of knots, which grows in the sand and from which they
make matting; but you no longer find gray amber, or black tin, or that
triple species of slate--one sort green, one blue, and the third the
colour of sage-leaves. The foxes, the badgers, the otters, and the
martens have taken themselves off; on the cliffs of Portland, as well as
at the extremity of Cornwall, where there were at one time chamois, none
remain. They still fish in some inlets for plaice and pilchards; but the
scared salmon no longer ascend the Wey, between Michaelmas and
Christmas, to spawn. No more are seen there, as during the reign of
Elizabeth, those old unknown birds as large as hawks, who could cut an
apple in two, but ate only the pips. You never meet those crows with
yellow beaks, called Cornish choughs in English, _pyrrocorax_ in Latin,
who, in their mischief, would drop burning twigs on thatched roofs. Nor
that magic bird, the fulmar, a wanderer from the Scottish archipelago,
dropping from his bill an oil which the islanders used to burn in their
lamps. Nor do you ever find in the evening, in the plash of the ebbing
tide, that ancient, legendary neitse, with the feet of a hog and the
bleat of a calf. The tide no longer throws up the whiskered seal, with
its curled ears and sharp jaws, dragging itself along on its nailless
paws. On that Portland--nowadays so changed as scarcely to be
recognized--the absence of forests precluded nightingales; but now the
falcon, the swan, and the wild goose have fled. The sheep of Portland,
nowadays, are fat and have fine wool; the few scattered ewes, which
nibbled the salt grass there two centuries ago, were small and tough and
coarse in the fleece, as became Celtic flocks brought there by
garlic-eating shepherds, who lived to a hundred, and who, at the
distance of half a