kittiwakes, and, at nightfall, shearwaters popping from their holes and
swimming and skimming around our boat as we headed for home. And then,
the nests we discovered!--nay, the nests that at times we walked among,
picking our steps like egg-dancers!--nests boldly planted on the bare
rock ledges; nests snugly hidden among the clusters of blue thrift and
the massed sea-pinks. They bloomed everywhere, these sea-pinks; sheet
upon sheet of pale rose-colour, soon to show paler and fade before the
rosy splendours of the mesembryanthemum. But the thrift had no rival to
fear, condensing blue heaven and blue sea in the flower it lifted
against both; and to lie prone and make a frame of it for some winding
channel when the tide-rip flashed and tossed was to send the eye
plunging into blue like an Eastern diver after pearls.

But when after sunset the blue deepened to violet, always in the heart
of it glowed the crimson light upon Off Island. Night after night I
watched it from my window, and wondered what manner of people they were
who tended it, living out yonder on a rock where no grass grew, and in a
roar of tide which the inhabitants of the greater islands heard on still
days in the few inland valleys where it was possible to lose sight of
the sea. I knew that thousands of puffins bred there, and we were to
visit the rock some day; but, what with the tides and an all but
ceaseless ground swell, our opportunity was long in coming, and Old Seth
(our boatman) kept putting it off until I began to disbelieve in it
altogether.

It came, though, at last, with a cloudless morning and a north-easterly
breeze, brisk and steady, the clearest day in a fortnight of clear days.
We were heading northward close-hauled through a sound dividing two of
the greater islands--Old Seth at the tiller, my father tending the
sheet, and I perched on the weather gunwale and peering over and down on