ses of whales, and
other sea refuse form its main diet.

The habits of the albatross during the breeding season are still
partially veiled in mystery, as the desolate mossy headlands of Tristan
d'Acunha, Inaccessible Island, and other lands lying far to the
southward, where the albatross makes its nest, are visited only at rare
intervals. The island of Tristan is circular, and almost entirely
volcanic, and on the summit of its cliffs, which rise a thousand feet
above the sea, on broad dreary plains of dark gray lava, the albatrosses
gather some time during November, and prepare themselves nests.
Selecting some space free from tussock-grass, the bird scrapes together
a circle of dried grass and clay, in which it lays one egg about the
size of a swan's, white, with a band of small brick-red spots round one
end. But few naturalists have been able to visit these great breeding
warrens, and none have determined how the albatross lives and feeds its
young during its absence from the ocean. It is certain that the great
bird rarely leaves its nest, for there is a wicked little robber gull
ever on the watch to break and eat the egg, should the mother-bird
desert it for a moment.

The young, when hatched, are snow-white, and covered with a soft woolly
down. A traveller once climbed up the dangerous precipice of Tristan
d'Acunha, and saw these young helpless things lying in the nests, while
several hundred pair of parent birds were stalking awkwardly about. They
all snapped their beaks with a great noise, and ejected from them an
offensive oil--their only means of defense. The same traveller visited
the place five months later, when he found all the young albatrosses
sitting in their nests as before, but the old birds had all disappeared.
It is supposed that an albatross must be a year old before it can fly;
and as the parents depart some time in April for their ocean hunting
grounds, and are never seen to return until the breeding season again
comes round, it is astonishing what feeds and supports the young until
they are able to hunt for themselves. Naturalists wonder over this
point, and advance many different theories, but as yet no facts have
been discovered in regard to the diet of the young and helpless bird.

The albatross was formerly regarded with superstitious reverence by
sailors, who considered this majestic companion which came around the
ship in desolate icy seas as a bird of good omen; and to kill one was
consid