snowy white,
with the tips of his wings jet black. If he would have come inshore like
the ospreys, I think I should never have tired of his evolutions.

The gannets showed themselves only now and then, but the brown pelicans
were an every-day sight. I had found them first on the beach at St.
Augustine. Here at Daytona they never alighted on the sand, and seldom
in the water. They were always flying up or down the beach, and, unless
turned from their course by the presence of some suspicious object, they
kept straight on just above the breakers, rising and falling with the
waves; now appearing above them, and now out of sight in the trough of
the sea. Sometimes a single bird passed, but commonly they were in small
flocks. Once I saw seventeen together,--a pretty long procession; for,
whatever their number, they went always in Indian file. Evidently some
dreadful thing would happen if two pelicans should ever travel abreast.
It was partly this unusual order of march, I suspect, which gave such an
air of preternatural gravity to their movements. It was impossible to
see even two of them go by without feeling almost as if I were in
church. First, both birds flew a rod or two with slow and stately
flappings; then, as if at some preconcerted signal, both set their wings
and scaled for about the same distance; then they resumed their wing
strokes; and so on, till they passed out of sight. I never heard them
utter a sound, or saw them make a movement of any sort (I speak of what
I saw at Daytona) except to fly straight on, one behind another. If
church ceremonials are still open to amendment, I would suggest, in no
spirit of irreverence, that a study of pelican processionals would be
certain to yield edifying results. Nothing done in any cathedral could
be more solemn. Indeed, their solemnity was so great that I came at last
to find it almost ridiculous; but that, of course, was only from a want
of faith on the part of the beholder. The birds, as I say, were _brown_
pelicans. Had they been of the other species, in churchly white and
black, the ecclesiastical effect would perhaps have been heightened,
though such a thing is hardly conceivable.

Some beautiful little gulls, peculiarly dainty in their appearance
("Bonaparte's gulls," they are called in books, but "surf gulls" would
be a prettier and apter name), were also given to flying along the
breakers, but in a manner very different from the pelicans'; as
different, I may s