ng to his own fancy on the untrodden whiteness.

Colonies of Arctic gulls harboured on the island, and the herring gulls
remained through the winter; these, where he could get near their rocks
upon the ice, he at first took delight in shooting; but he soon lost the
zest for this sport, for the birds gave themselves to his gun too
easily. He was capable of deriving pleasure from them other than in
their slaughter, and often he rode under their rocky homes, noting how
dark their white plumage looked against their white resting-places,
where groups of them huddled together upon the icy battlements and
snowdrift towers of the castles that the frost had built them. He would
ride by slowly, and shoot his gun in the air to see them rise and wheel
upward, appearing snow-white against the blue firmament; and watched
them sink again, growing dark as they alighted among the snow and ice.
His warning that he himself must be nearing home was to see the return
of such members of the bird-colony as had been out for the deep-sea
fishing. When he saw them come from afar, flying high, often with their
wings dyed pink in the sunset rays, he knew that his horse must gallop
homeward, or darkness might come and hide such cracks and fissures in
the ice as were dangerous.

The haunts of the birds which he chiefly loved were on the side of the
islands turned to the open sea, for at this time ice had formed on all
sides, and stretched without a break for a mile or so into the open.
There was a joy in riding upon this that made riding upon the bay tame
and uninteresting; for not only was the seaward shore of island and dune
wilder, but the ice here might at any time break from the shore or
divide itself up into large islands, and when the wind blew he fancied
he heard the waves heaving beneath it, and the excitement which comes
with danger, which, by some law of mysterious nature, is one of the
keenest forms of pleasure, would animate his horse and himself as they
flew over it.

His horse was not one of the native ponies; it was a well-bred,
delicately-shaped beast, accustomed to be made a friend of by its rider,
and giving sympathetic response to all his moods. The horse belonged to
Madame Le Maitre, and was similar to the one she rode. This, together
with many other things, proved to Caius that the lady who lived so
frugally had command of a certain supply of money, for it could not be
an easy or cheap thing to transport good horses to these