helter all the little loves and great loves that crave admittance?

As we neared the tiny fishing-village on the sands we met a fishwife
brave in her short skirt and eight petticoats, the basket with its two
hundred pound weight on her head, and the auld wife herself knitting
placidly as she walked along. They look superbly strong, these women;
but, to be sure, the 'weak anes dee,' as one of them told me.

There was an air of bustle about the little quay,--

'That joyfu' din when the boats come in,
When the boats come in sae early;
When the lift is blue an' the herring-nets fu',
And the sun glints in a' things rarely.'

The silvery shoals of fish no longer come so near the shore as they used
in the olden time, for then the kirk bell of St. Monan's had its tongue
tied when the 'draive' was off the coast, lest its knell should frighten
away the shining myriads of the deep.

We climbed the shoulder of a great green cliff until we could sit on the
rugged rocks at the top and overlook the sea. The bluff is well named
Nirly Scaur, and a wild desolate spot it is, with grey lichen-clad
boulders and stunted heather on its summit. In a storm here, the wind
buffets and slashes and scourges one like invisible whips, and below the
sea churns itself into foaming waves, driving its 'infinite squadrons
of wild white horses' eternally toward the shore. It was calm and blue
to-day, and no sound disturbed the quiet save the incessant shriek
and scream of the rock birds, the kittiwakes, black-headed gulls, and
guillemots that live on the sides of these high sheer craigs. Here the
mother guillemot lays her single egg, and here, on these narrow shelves
of precipitous rock, she holds it in place with her foot until the
warmth of her leg and overhanging body hatches it into life, when
she takes it on her back and flies down to the sea. Motherhood under
difficulties, it would seem, and the education of the baby guillemot is
carried forward on Spartan principles; for the moment he is out of the
shell he is swept downward hundreds of feet and plunged into a cold
ocean, where he can sink or swim as instinct serves him. In a life so
fraught with anxieties, exposures, and dangers, it is not strange that
the guillemots keeps up a ceaseless clang of excited conversation,
a very riot and wrangle of altercation and argument which the
circumstances seem to warrant. The prospective father is obliged to take
turns with the prospective m