five or six, skimming low over the waves,
shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for
a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at it
were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air
for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and
forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore
birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the
water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for
his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb
style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
creature as before.

A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a bird
that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--is
the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the
face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.

I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above
the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate
to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of
the shore.

III. SILKEN CHAMBERS

The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting
bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner
near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of
uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows
of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to
the place.

The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My
guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed,
found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's
touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of
detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground
and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet
of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how,
fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with
my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown
earth at my feet that suggested a trap-d