Could I give all the details of this fearful journey, it would make interesting reading, but I sat in rain and wind, and my hands were so numbed with cold that I found it difficult to use the glasses, and quite impossible to take notes. All that I can say now--this same evening--is that once, in getting down to its mother, who waited for it at different stages, it did actually fall and roll head over heels down the rock. I thought all was over, but it recovered itself on a tiny projection, seeming none the worse, and, shortly after, arrived with its mother on the ledge. Here there were some three or four more birds, and the chick, as I noticed, now, and several times afterwards, seemed glad to go to any of them. One it ran up to, and this bird behaved exactly as the first one had done, _jodel_-ing over it, and caressing it with its bill. Now, if this last bird was the chick's parent, the one that had a little before done the same thing, and still sat in the same place on another part of the rock, could not also be, for that the eyed bird who had fetched it away must have been either its father or mother, is a thing indubitable, not only by reason of that one act, but also on account of its general conduct both before and afterwards. One, therefore, of the two birds that caressed the chick must have been a stranger to it, but the fact is that both were, for whilst the last that had done so was still on the ledge, and but shortly afterwards, in flew a bird from the sea with a fish in his bill, and fed the chick. Now, I cannot, as far as eyesight goes, affirm that this bird was not the one that the chick had first gone to, and by whom it had been kindly received; but that one of a pair of guillemots should sit for a long time, not only by itself, but far removed from the chick and the other one, and that afterwards, when the chick had gone to it, this other one, its own mate, should excitedly fetch it away, is a thing quite out of accordance with all I have yet seen of the domestic relations of these birds. It is true that, in this case, a motive can be imagined for the chick's excursion, but whilst my later observations have shown me that, as the chick gets older, it does move about, I have never known it trouble about an absent parent whilst it had one by it. I have never, that I remember, seen the chick seek to be fed before one or other of its dams had flown in with a fish, and I attribute the anxiety which this one showed to reach the bird in question, to its distress at finding itself in so precarious a situation. In this, however, I may be wrong, but since it is beyond doubt that one stranger bird caressed the chick, it is not very essential to prove that another did. The likelihood is that one would be as willing to as another, and I did, indeed, notice that all the birds on the ledge to which the chick was brought back, seemed to take a kindly interest in it, especially another white-eyed one, which the mother several times drove away from it--being jealous, as I suppose. The state of affairs appeared to me to be this, that all the birds had a tender feeling towards the chick, that the chick, if left to itself, was inclined to go to any one of them, and that whatever one it did go to was ready to _jodel_ over it, and caress it. Not having been able to note down every little thing at the time, I cannot now give the general evidence on which this impression was founded, but I have recounted the special incidents.