too, and I wondered how _he_ came there. Above this shadowy moving
crowd rode the stars I had known at home. I took my father's hand. At
the head of the gangway he stooped, hoisted me on his shoulders, and
carried me up and up through narrow mysterious streets, around dark
corners, past belated islanders hurrying down to the steamer; but always
upward, until he pushed open a door and set me down blinking in a
whitewashed bedroom lit by a couple of candles: and with that came
sleep.

Happy days followed: blue and white days--days vaulted and floored with
blue, flashing with white granite, with the rush of white water beneath
the shadow of the leaning sail, with white cirrus clouds, with white
wings of seabirds. It was the height of the nesting season, and the
birds had brought us to the islands; my father with paint-box and
camera--though, our time being short, he relied almost wholly on the
latter. A naturalist, and by temper the gentlest of men, in his methods
he was a born pioneer. You can hardly imagine how cumbrous and
well-nigh hopeless a business it was in those days, not so long past, to
pursue after wild life with a camera; but a thousand disheartening
failures left him still grasping the inviolable shade, still confident
that in photography, if it could only be given with rapidity and
precision, lay the naturalist's hope. Blurred negatives were all the
spoil, and, sorry enough, we bore back after long days of tossing and
climbing among the Outer Islands; but we had the reward of living among
the birds. They filled our thoughts, our lives for the time:--great
cormorants and northern divers, flitting red-legged oyster-catchers,
shags spreading their wings to the wind and sun, sea-parrots, murrs,
razor-bills, gannets questing by ones and twos--now poised, now dropping
like plummets with a resounding splash; sandpipers and curlews dotting
the beaches, and wading; tern, common gulls, herring-gulls, and