Altogether the effect was very singular
the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought
by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered
irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of
cultivated smoothness--potato rows, green parallel lines
ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant
cabbage-globes--each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion
leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the
villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had
made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls,
careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied
with their own affairs.
I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the
birds. I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage
if their breeding-place had been shared with other species.
Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked
their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and
yellow legs and beaks. While I watched them they watched me;
not gathered in groups, but singly or in pairs, scattered up
and down all over the face of the precipice above me, perched
on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock. Standing motionless
thus, beautiful in form and colour, they looked like
sculptured figures of gulls, set up on the projections against
the rough dark wall of rock, just as sculptured figures of
angels and saintly men and women are placed in niches on a
cathedral front.
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