ce rise and fall with the
gentle undulating swell, seeing dimly overhead the blue sky, flecked with
hosts of fleecy white clouds. A nearer, swifter cloud approaches,
hesitates, splashes into their midst,--and the parent gull has caught her
first fish of the day. Instinctively the young bird dives; in his joy of
very life he cries aloud,--the gull-cry which his ancestors of long ago
have handed down to him. At night he seeks the shore and tucks his bill
into his plumage; and all because of something within him, compelling him
to do these things.

But far from being an automaton, his bright eye and full-rounded head
presage higher things. Occasionally his mind breaks through the mist of
instinct and reaches upward to higher activity.

As with the other wild kindred of the ocean, food was the chief object of
the day's search. Fish were delicious, but were not always to be had;
crabs were a treat indeed, when caught unawares, but for mile after mile
along the coast were hosts of mussels and clams,--sweet and lucious, but
incased in an armour of shell, through which there was no penetrating.
However swift a dash was made upon one of these,--always the clam closed a
little quicker, sending a derisive shower of drops over the head of the
gull.

Once, after a week of rough weather, the storm gods brought their battling
to a climax. Great green walls of foaming water crashed upon the rocks,
rending huge boulders and sucking them down into the black depths. Over
and through the spray dashed the gull, answering the wind's howl--shriek
for shriek, poising over the fearful battlefield of sea and shore.

A wave mightier than all hung and curved, and a myriad shell-fish were
torn from their sheltered nooks and hurled high, in air, to fall broken
and helpless among the boulders. The quick eye of the gull saw it all, and
at that instant of intensest chaos of the elements, the brain of the bird
found itself.

Shortly afterward came night and sleep, but the new-found flash of
knowledge was not lost.

The next day the bird walked at low tide into the stronghold of the
shell-fish, roughly tore one from the silky strands of its moorings, and
carrying it far upward let it fall at random among the rocks. The
toothsome morsel was snatched from its crushed shell and a triumphant
scream told of success,--a scream which, could it have been interpreted,
should have made a myriad, myriad mussels shrink within their shells!

From gull to gull