I note one more thing before leaving. A bird picks up and, as it were, plays with some feathers lying on the ledge, one of which it now brings to its partner, lays it on the rock, and then both pull it about. This, too, I noticed when I was last here. I have mentioned it in my _Bird Watching_, and account for it by supposing that we here see a last trace of the once active nest-building instinct. Perhaps, however, the act is too trivial to need any special accounting for.
Would God my home were here, that I might make a lifelong and continuous study of the wild sea-bird life about me! What more should I want, then? except, indeed, a better climate, which is not a matter of culture. Of all that civilisation has to give I value nothing much (that I can get) except books, and those I might have here, at least in a moderate profusion, "the hundred (or so) best" ones--of my own choice _bien entendu_; the devil take any other man's. "Oh, hell! to choose love by another's eyes." But all my own writers--with never an impudent, pert critic amongst them to _échauffer ma bile_--awaiting me at home, with these birds--these dear birds--to look down upon outside, and I think I might be happy, as things go. But with such a strange blending of tastes and desires as nature has put upon me, how can I ever hope to be, to any satisfactory extent? What I want, really, is the veldt, or Brazilian forests, or Lapland, or the Spanish Marisma, with the British Museum library round the corner; but, as Cleopatra says of two other things, "they do not go together."
"Well, here's my comfort" for a time--my half-measure of content. Oh, is there anything in life more piquant (if you care about it) than to lie on the summit of a beetling cliff, and watch the breeding sea-fowl on the ledges below? In the Shetlands, at least, it is possible to do this in perfect safety, for the strata of the rock have often been tilted up to such an extent that, whilst the precipice formed by their broken edges is of the most fearful description, their slope, even on the landward side, is so steep that when one has climbed it, and flung oneself full length at the top, one's head looks down--as mine does now--as from a slanting wall, against which one's body leans. To fall over, one would first have to fall upwards, and the knowledge of this gives a feeling of security, without which one could hardly observe or take notes. The one danger lies in becoming abstracted and forgetting where one is. Those steep, green banks--for the rock, except in smooth, unclimbable patches, is covered with lush grass--have no appearance of an edge, and I have often shuddered, whilst plodding mechanically upwards, to find myself but just awakened from a reverie, within a yard or so of their soft-curled, lap-like crests. But I think my "subliminal," in such cases, was always pretty well on the watch, or--to adopt a more prosaic and now quite obsolete explanation--the reverie was not a very deep one.