l grow
stale in here, whether you choose to practise this art or that. Houses
are well enough to sleep in and to give shelter; but it is the heavens
that give strength, and it is God's heaven that somehow, if only feebly,
must get itself reflected in man's work.

So, in another instant, these two would be out together; the one going as
far as tether would allow; the other doing what was yet another of his
joys in life, and that caused such fun and merriment to lookers-on--the
hunting of birds. Of that he never tired on the longest or the hottest
day. Blackbirds gave the finest sport of all, as they generally flew only
three feet above the ground. He knew their note at once; but probably the
laugh of the green woodpecker vexed him more than most, while he
certainly regarded the mocking notes of cuckoos as insults to himself. Of
birds of various kinds he caught many, young and old, but was never known
to hurt a single one.

The most remarkable of his exploits in this direction was when he found
himself at one time by the sea. It was a lonely coast, where great
crimson cliffs rose sheer out of the sand, their ledges, here and there,
covered with tamarisk, gorse, and shaven thorn--right to their very
summit three hundred feet above, from whence the moors stretched far away
inland. A heavy surf beat there at times, setting these cliffs echoing in
such a way as to make speech difficult. On these wild days it was well
that this dog had learnt to work so perfectly by hand, for he had no fear
of the rollers, and the wonder was that he escaped from being drowned.

At the bottom of the whole fun of this new situation lay the fact that
these cliffs were inhabited by innumerable gulls. To catch one of these
was Murphy's aim, and often was he washed out on to the sands in a
smother of spindrift, in his mad eagerness to attain his end. The
herring-gulls were the finest sport of all, with their constant
melancholy cries--"pew-il," "pee-ole," or their hoarser note of warning,
"kak-k-kak"; their bodies two feet in length; their spread of wing no
less than four feet four. For months he chased them, till at last some
must possibly have known him. It was perhaps on this account that one of
them was not quick enough in getting under way on one occasion. Murphy
flung himself into the air and got him; and not only got him, but brought
him along, with the great wings beating the air about him, so that the
dog was scarcely visible for the bird