igh on an old stump, "wouldn't
you like to have one sniff of a sea-breeze, and a look round for a
sea-pyot or two? What do they give you here--dead fish, I suppose?"

The eagle raised its great wings and slowly flapped them once or twice,
while it uttered a succession of shrill _yawps_.

"Oh yes," he said, "you could make yourself heard above the sound of the
waves. And I think if any of the boys were after your eggs or your young
ones, you could make short work of them with those big wings. Or would
you like to have a battle-royal with a seal, and try whether you could
pilot the seal in to the shore, or whether the seal would drag you and
your fixed claws down to the bottom and drown you?"

There was a solitary kittiwake in a cage devoted to sea-birds, nearly
all of which were foreigners.

"You poor little kittiwake," said he, "this is a sad place for you to be
in. I think you would rather be out at Ru-Treshanish, even if it was
blowing hard, and there was rain about. There was a dead whale came
ashore there about a month ago; that would have been something like a
feast for you."

"Why," said he, to his human companion, "if I had only known before!
Whenever there was an hour or two with nothing to do, here was plenty of
occupation. But I must not keep you too long, Miss White. I could remain
here days and weeks."

"You will not go without looking in at the serpents," said she, with a
slight smile.

He hesitated for a second.

"No," said he; "I think I will not go in to see them."

"But you must," said she, cruelly. "You will see they are not such
terrible creatures when they are shut up in glass boxes."

He suffered himself to be led along to the reptile house; but he was
silent. He entered the last of the three. He stood in the middle of the
room, and looked around him in rather a strange way.

"Now, come and look at this splendid fellow," said Miss White, who, with
her sister, was leaning over the rail. "Look at his splendid bars of
color! Do you see the beautiful blue sheen on its scales?"

It was a huge anaconda, its body as thick as a man's leg, lying coiled
up in a circle; its flat, ugly head reposing in the middle. He came a
bit nearer. "Hideous!" was all he said. And then his eyes was fixed on
the eyes of the animal--the lidless eyes, with their perpetual glassy
stare. He had thought at first they were closed; but now he saw that
that opaque yellow substance was covered by a glassy coating, while