I cannot, and cannot but remember this, though I am so altruistic that I keep on imagining myself to be them. Now I see the chick that I thought had gone, making the fourth again, in all. It must have moved some distance, to get to where it is. And now comes the Shetland rain.
This was a sharp shower, and by being driven to take refuge I have found a better place. I now look down upon the same slab of rock, not thirty feet below me, that I watched before across a gulf. Seven grown guillemots are full in view, and, now and then, two of the chicks. In these I notice that the black of the upper surface is beginning to encroach upon the white of the throat, which, a day or two back, extended to the beak, being continuous with the breast and belly. Now a little collar of black is pushing round from both sides under the chin, and trying to meet, thinly and faintly, in the centre. The colouring of the adult bird, therefore, in which the neck and throat are dark like the body, is in process of establishing itself.
Each of these two chicks is guarded by a parent bird, who stands between it and the sea; but one of them more relentlessly so than the other. Another parent, who may pass for the mother, stands a little behind one of them, and stretches out a wing. The little one, snuggling up to her, presses its little head amongst the feathers of her side, just under this wing. The mother immediately clasps him with it, and, with half of him thus concealed, he squats down on the rock and evidently goes to sleep. And so close and
