lican, the eagle and other birds less
familiar. Although seagulls have of late years been increasingly in
evidence beside the bridges of London, they are still, to the majority
of folk living far inland, symbolical of the August holiday at the
coast, and their splendid flight and raucous cries are among the most
enduring memories of that yearly escape from the smoke of cities.

The voice of gulls can with difficulty be regarded as musical, yet those
of us who live the year round by the sea find their plaintive mewing as
nicely tuned to that wild environment as the amorous gurgling of
nightingales to moonlit woods in May. Their voice may have no great
range, but at any rate it is not lacking in variety, suggesting to the
playful imagination laughter, tears, and other human moods to which they
are in all probability strangers. The curious similarity between the
note of a seagull and the whining of a cat bereft of her kittens is very
striking, and was on one occasion the cause of my being taken in by one
of these birds in a deep and beautiful backwater of the Sea of Marmora,
beside which I spent one pleasant summer. In this particular gulf, at
the head of which stands the ancient town of Ismidt, gulls, though
plentiful in the open sea, are rarely in evidence, being replaced by
herons and pelicans. I had not therefore set eyes on a seagull for many
weeks, when early one morning I heard, from the farther side of a wooded
headland, a new note suggestive of a wild cat or possibly a lynx. My
Greek servant tried in his patois to explain the unseen owner of the
mysterious voice, but it was only when a small gull suddenly came
paddling round the corner that I realised my mistake.

In addition to being at home on the seashore, and particularly in
estuaries and where the coast is rocky, gulls are a familiar sight in
the wake of steamers at the beginning and ending of the voyage, as well
as following the plough and nesting in the vicinity of inland meres and
marshes. The black-headed kind is peculiarly given to bringing up its
family far from the sea, just as the salmon ascends our rivers for the
same purpose. It is not perhaps a very loving parent, seeing that the
mortality among young gulls, many of which show signs of rough treatment
by their elders, is unusually great. On most lakes rich in fish these
birds have long established themselves, and they were, I remember, as
familiar at Geneva and Neuchatel as along the shores of Lake