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Nevertheless it is true that there are scores of comparatively insignificant sea and land birds whose feathers are supposed to cover larger powers for good or evil than even the spacious-winged albatross.

The common house-sparrow: here surely is a strange little fowl of the air to parallel, nay to surpass the wizard powers of the shrieking monarch of the Horn and the Southern Ocean; and yet it is gravely asserted that should sparrows be blown away to sea and alight upon a ship they are not to be taken or even chased, for in proportion as the birds are molested must sail be shortened to provide against the storm that will certainly come. In the interests of humanity nothing could be better than such superstitions. The harmless and beautiful gull, whose lovely sweepings and curvings through the air, whose exquisite self-balancing capacity in the teeth of a living gale, whose bright eyes, salt, shrewd voice, and webbed feet folded in bosom of ermine, it is impossible to sufficiently admire, though there be unhappily no lack of sea-side Nathaniel Winkles who regard this pretty creature as a mark set up by Nature for cockneys to shoot at, has a commercial virtue that sets it high in the long shoreman’s catalogue of things to be approved; for when this bird appears in great numbers then is its presence accepted as an infallible sign of the neighbourhood of herring shoals.