rock-bowlders, and green grass behind the rock-bowlders, and
brown-plush furze behind the green grass, and a patch of blue sky over
all. And in the middle of the little bay in the inlet, bob-bobbing on
the lap-lapping of the littlest waves, that--sifted out by then, as it
were--had found their way so far, floated the skua, the Richardson's or
Arctic skua, dead, to all appearances, as the proverbial door-nail.
But that was not the rub. The rub was in the--ah!

"He-oh!" pealed down the clear, ringing bugle-cry from above, and a
shadow floated upon the reflections a-dance on the surface in the
little bay in the little inlet--floated and hung, so that it exactly
covered the skua like a funeral pall; floated, and hung, and came down.
As its claws scraped a bowlder, and it furled its long, narrow vans, it
was revealed as the big herring-gull--him we left out upon the face of
the waters, watching and waiting on chance.

His spotless expanse of head and neck alone marked him, gave him away,
a speck you could see for a mile. His size--just on two feet--proved
what his snowy hood proclaimed, in case there were any doubts. A
smaller gull, an uncommon common gull--of eighteen inches--came and
looked, to make quite sure--and went away again. The herring-gull, in
spite of his silly name, has a reputation, and a "plug ugly" one.

And the herring-gull, he--did nothing. That is the strength of the
herring-gull--doing nothing. He can do it for an hour, half a morning,
or most of a day. His battle-cry might well have been, "Wait and see,"
but he must be one of the few living, breathing things on this earth
who have made the game pay, and--lived. He might have been a lump of
chalk, or a marble carving, or a stuffed specimen, or asleep, or dead,
for all the signs of living that he gave. One began to wonder if he
ever would move again. He had been a bird, but was now the life-size
model of one cut in alabaster, with clear pebbles for eyes--they were
quite as hard and cold as that, his eyes.

And all the time the body of the skua floated, and danced, and drifted,
and lifted in, making an inch on one wavelet, to lose three-quarters of
it on the next, but still, unnoticeably perhaps, but undoubtedly,
gradually, surely, for all that, drifting in.

Somebody has written somewhere that gulls never touch a carcass on
land. Sometimes they touch things on land which were not carcasses
before they touched them. This gull, however, did