ers remorselessly and piling them up against the
land without cessation, and as though bent on its destruction.

Great gouts of clotted foam flew over his head in clouds, and plastered
his rock with shivering sponges. The sheets of spray from his south-west
rocks lashed him incessantly. His shelter was as wet inside as out, as
he was himself.

He felt empty and hungry at times, but never thirsty; his skin absorbed
moisture enough and to spare. But, chilled and clammed and starving, on
the fifth day when he had crawled into his wet burrow for such small
relief as it might offer from the ceaseless flailing without, he
broached his bottle of cognac and drank a little, and found himself the
better of it.

On the evening of the third day his hopes had risen with a slight
slackening of the turmoil. He was not sure if the gale had really
abated, or if it was only that he was growing accustomed to it. But
under that belief, and the compulsion of a growling stomach, he crawled
precariously round to the eastern end of the rock where the puffins had
their holes, lying flat when the great gusts snatched at him as though
they were bent on hurling him into the water, and gliding on again in
the intervals. And there, with a piece of his firewood he managed to
extort half-a-dozen eggs from fiercely expostulating parents. The end of
his stick was bitten to fragments, but he got his eggs, and was amazed
at the size of them compared with that of their producers.

The sight of the great wall of tumbled rocks on his right, and the
sudden remembrance of his previous passage over it, set him wondering if
it might not be possible to find better shelter in some of those
fissures across which he had had to swing himself by the hands on the
previous occasion. For this was the leeward side of the island, and the
huge bulk of it rose like a protecting shoulder between him and the
gale, whereas his bee-hive, on the exposed flank of the rock, got the
full force of it. So he scooped a hole in the friable black soil and
deposited his eggs in it and crawled along to the wall.

The tumbled fragments looked much less fearsome than they had done in
the fog. He found no difficulty in clambering among them now, when he
could see clearly what he was about, and he wormed his way in and out,
and up and down, but could not light on any of those tricky spaces which
had seemed to him so dangerous before.

And then, as he crawled under one huge slab, a black