ted overhead, watching him curiously,
"Well, what are you looking at? I've not come egging now."

The gull uttered a mournful cry and glided off seaward, to dive down
directly after beyond the cliff, its cry sounding distant and faint.

The boat came on nearer and nearer till it, too, disappeared, being
hidden by the great bluff to his left.

Then half a dozen more gulls rose up and came skimming along the rugged
trough-like depression towards where he sat, with bird-covered ledges to
left and right. When they caught sight of him they rose higher with a
graceful curve, and began wheeling round, uttering their discordant
cries, some of the more daring coming nearer and nearer upon their
widespread spotless wings, white almost as snow, till a sway would send
one wing down, the other up, giving the looker-on a glimpse of the soft
bluish grey of their backs, save in the cases of the larger birds--the
great thieves and pirates among the young--which were often black.

There was no boat to watch now, so Aleck, after sweeping the horizon in
search of the sloop-of-war, gradually turned the end of his glass inland
over the sweep of down and wild moor, till, just as he was in the act of
lowering it, he caught sight, some distance off and directly inland, of
some object which looked like a short, pudgy, black and white bird
sitting upon a rock.

"What's that?" he said, steadying the glass which had given him the
glimpse in passing over it; but, try he would, he could not catch the
object again.

"Couldn't have been a rabbit," he muttered. "Fancy, perhaps," and he
lowered the glass, to begin closing it as he trusted to his unaided
vision and looked in the direction of the grey weathered rocks.

"Why, there it is!" he cried. "It's a black bird with a white breast.
It must be some big kind of puffin sitting with its feathers stuck-up to
dry."

He began to focus the glass once more, and raised it to his eye; but he
could not get the object in the field of the glass again, nor yet when
he lowered it catch a glimpse of that which he sought with his naked
eye.

Turning away to look down the deep depression, he began to watch the
birds again, when he was impressed by the cry of one which seemed to
have settled, after passing overhead, somewhere on the open beyond the
ridge in which lay the niche containing the old lanthorn.

"Ahoy-oy-oy!" he cried, softly, trying to imitate, but with very poor
success, the gull's querulous