wheeled, would have seemed the most likely place in which to search for it. No doubt, had the nest been well concealed, the birds would have done better not to have shown themselves, but conspicuous as it was, they could hardly have adopted a better plan of getting me away from just that part of the coast where it was situated.
I have spoken in the last chapter of the extreme boldness of the smaller of the two skuas, and how, whether in sport or piracy, he chases birds much larger than himself. It was, therefore, something of a surprise to me when I observed one morning this bold buccaneer being himself pursued by another bird. This was one of a pair of curlews, birds that are as the spirit of the sad solitudes in which they dwell. It is, indeed, more as a part of the scene—that treeless, mist-enshrouded waste beneath grey northern skies, which they emphasise and add expression to—than in themselves that one gets to consider them. Just thickening with a shape the dank, moist atmosphere, seeming to have been strained and wrung out from the mist and rain and drizzle, they are, at most, but a moulded, vital part of these. They move like shadows on the mists, when they cry, desolation has found its utterance. And yet, for all this, their general appearance, with their long legs and neck, and immensely long sickle-shaped bill, is very much that of an ibis—insomuch, that seeing them in this bleak northern land, has sometimes almost a bizarre effect. This should seem quite irreconcilable with the other, and yet, though it certainly ought to be, somehow it is not, so that, at one and the same time, this opposite bird brings a picture, by looking like
