greater numbers, guillemots of refined, though foolish, aspect. But the bird that frequents the island in greatest numbers is the puffin.

This quaint bird is present here during the nesting season, literally in thousands, and the surface of the ocean is at times darkened by them as they swim and bathe of a summer morning. Most consequential of birds is the puffin.

He always seems to me to resemble a dignified and respectable club-man unruffled, unperturbed, and taking life - which he finds a pleasant thing

with rare philosophy and calm. But for all that, life to the puffin is full of dangers. Great black-backed gulls at times lie in wait for him at the entrance to his nesting burrow and pounce on the luckless bird as he emerges, either swallowing him whole a more terrible fate disembowelling him and, having devoured the entrails, leaving the victim, perhaps still alive, to perish miserably.

or

With the coming of May, there arrive at their nesting cliffs many graceful kittiwakes, most charming and contented of all gulls. In the kittiwake there seems implanted a curiously strong love for its nest. For weeks before they have commenced to lay, the birds sit, or stand, contentedly upon the platform of the nests of previous seasons, and likewise in late summer, when the young have left the nest, or when, perhaps, some misfortune has robbed the kittiwakes of their eggs or broods, they still haunt their nest, standing, the pair of them, for hours at their home, with every sign of happiness and

to the Hebridean islands, and with the approach of autumn make their way to more southerly and less stormswept latitudes.

On the higher slopes of the island, Manx shearwaters have their summer home, choosing as their nesting sites the rabbit burrows where they remain in darkness during the hours of daylight and emerge only at dusk. It has always seemed to me curious that this bird should be entirely of nocturnal habits while at its nesting site, while at sea it may be observed flying actively with graceful and charming. flight even on days of most brilliant sunshine. Yet one may, time after time, visit an island on which thousands of these petrels are nesting and yet see not a single one, till long past

sunset.

The last summer visitor to arrive at the island is perhaps the most charming and interesting of them all.

Less than a swallow in size is this bird of the ocean, and so frail that it is hard to realize how it is able to face the Atlantic storms of winter. To this small wanderer the name storm petrel has been given from the fact that its appearance to the mariner presages a storm or heavy weather.

The word petrel is, I believe, derived from the habit of fluttering down to the surface of the ocean for an instant or two and skimming the waters with drooping feet just touching the sea and thus, like St. Peter of old, walking on the water. It is not until the very end of June, when full summer is come to the island, and when no night in these northerly latitudes falls on the ocean, that the storm petrel comes in from the immense tracts of the Atlantic. Here it has spent the winter and spring, hundreds of miles from the nearest land, and riding out the storms which, day after day, for many weeks on

end sweep the surface of the sea. The wing power of this little petrel must be quite untiring, for there must be many days and nights in succession when the Atlantic is too storm-tossed for it to alight on the waters for more than a second or two at a time. Thus, throughout the long and dark December nights and short hours of misty daylight the storm petrel must wheel continuously in flight, skimming the great waves and without a moment's respite battling with the storm.

How, during such stormy spells, can the small traveler obtain sleep? It would seem as though it were compelled to fore-go all rest for many days at a time. That not infrequently it is exhausted by the gales is apparent from the fact that not a winter passes but a few of the birds, tired out and perhaps dying, are found in the most unlikely places many miles from the coast. Of all birds the storm petrel is the latest to nest. Not till the opening days of July are the first eggs laid, and in late August at a time when puffin and guillemot have completed their nesting and have left the island with their young, some of the storm petrels are still brooding their solitary egg on which they sit for five weary weeks.

Thus the young are not able to take wing until well into the autumn when the season of storms is rapidly approaching indeed may have already commenced. I have often wondered that this small bird should be so late with her nesting. One would have imagined that it were important for her chick to be hardy and vigorous before the settled weather of summer left the Atlantic. But the nesting of all birds, both on land and on sea, is influenced by the food available for their young, and I imagine it is for this reason that the storm petrel delays until July the depositing of

her single egg in the twilight of the crannies among the rocks and boulders of this Hebridean isle.

I know the island at every season of the year in winter, when the spray from the great Atlantic waves drifts on the wings of the storm over the topmost point of the grassy hill, and in spring, when all the mountain ranges of the mainland and of the Isle of Skye stand out in the clear sunshine with the smoke of many heather fires rising, blue and ethereal, into the quiet air. But of all the seasons, it is during the months of June and July, in fine steady weather, as the fishermen say, that the charm of this lonely island is at its height.

At this season, accompanied by a kindred lover of the island and its birds, I have pitched my tent on the green, grassy slopes and, day by day, busied myself with the study and photographing of the island birds. During such days of summer, it is good to have one's home on the island. By reason of its configuration there is always shelter from the wind on some part of the island, and the sun shines on the sheltered slopes with great power and warmth. And what can be finer than one's tent to see the first of the sunrise on the northeastern horizon where from behind a range of conical and far-distant hills the sun, a red glowing ball, first appears? And then, when full daylight is come, what a marvelous view of hill, sea, and glen can be spied from the summit of the little hill.

With the coming of autumn, the summer bird visitors to the island take their departure for the open sea, and, except for the storm petrels, which linger on till October and November, the island is left to the buzzard and raven, and to the lordly peregrine and wicked, greater blackback.

REVERIE

BY ADRIAN BURY

INTO the barn, through many a leak The West wind wanders clumsily; Old broken hinges wail and creak Like motives in a threnody;

SONNET

BY GERALD GOULD

THE creeping hours have caught us un

awares,

And while we yet stand breathless from the thrill

The shoulders of this rustic shed
Like an old man's are dry of sap;
The beams are worn and withered,
And fallen tiles have left a gap;
Hollowed and cracked, the stone-

flagged floor,

By foot and hoof and season's store.

There is a strong wine smell about, And apples' wrinkling faces peep From straw, and chaff, and log-wood out;

And scythes and sickles in a heap Stacked yonder by the pitch-dark wall, Of harvest are symbolical.

And when the golden summer sung, And Ceres, at whose silken breast,

The lovely cherub infants hung,

and chill

Has stol'n the color from the golden

airs:

The dead and equal light of evening bares

The world of shade ere shade shall have its fill;

And the vague gleams on river, fold and hill

Are lost and lonely as unanswered prayers.

Draw closer to me, dear: the greater need

Must breed the greater solace. All about,

The moods and marvels of the day go out

Like candles blown upon: the heat, the speed,

blessed

The patient toiling husbandmen

Ere yielding up her fruits again.

redress,

And love that's weary is not love the

less.