ALBATROSS DESCRIBED.

55

often succeed in getting all the bait without being hooked. But six or seven times they were taken and hauled aboard, the unsuspected hook catching within their long bills. They measure nine and ten feet across the wings. The first one was killed and stuffed, to be carried home for some museum. The rest were sacrificed for their long bills, wings, and large web feet. This bird is uncommonly beautiful and majestic, whether soaring sublimely upon the wing, or seen as a prisoner upon a ship's deck, from which we found they are unable to rise. Their motion through space is the easiest and most graceful conceivable. In storm or calm, once raised upon their broad pinions, you never see them flutter, but away they sail, selfpropelled as naturally as we breathe; a motion of the head, or the slight curl of a wing serving to turn them, as the course of a rapid skater will be ruled at pleasure by an almost imperceptible inclination to right or left. It is the reality of that motion through space, which we sometimes conceive of in dreams, when we are borne along without conscious effort on our part, or any means of propulsion but our own free will.

If the eagle be the king of birds, the albatross ought to be called the queen, so queen-like and stately is her course on the wing, and so dignified, mild, and unfearing is her expression when captured. Her eye is full, bright, and expressive, like that of a gazelle; the head and neck large, but admirably proportioned; the feathers either a pure white or delicately penciled and speckled, except on the upper side of the wings, which are mostly black. There was an expression of pathos and intelligence about the eye of the first one cap->

tured that made it seem to me like a sin to take its life. Could I have had my way, that look should have given it liberty.

A poor Peruvian, who is working his passage home, ascribed all our bad weather and high winds afterward to having killed the albatrosses; and he and the superstitious cook, in the height of the gale, prevailed upon a young passenger who had taken one the day previous, and was keeping it alive in the long-boat, to let the noble bird go free. Like the mariners in Cole ridge's Rime, they said,

We had done a hellish thing,

And it would work us woe:

Stout they averr'd we had kill'd the bird
That made the breeze to blow.

Ah, wretch! said they, the bird to slay,

That made the breeze to blow!

If superstition always made men thus humane, we might almost mourn that its dominion is passing away; but our cheerful belief is that in the good time coming it will soon be succeeded by an intelligent and pure faith, that shall make men humane from principle and inbred humanity, and gentle from unaffected love toward all the creatures of God. The lesson the Ancient Mariner learned from his strange experience, and told to the Wedding Guest, is the true one:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man, and bird, and beast.

AN ESTHETIC

SUBJECT.

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Some one says of himself, what is true of humanity at large, that when the mind is fair and open, and the soul right, there is not a bird or flower I see that does not move my heart to feel toward it as a child of God; and it is a maxim of conduct I take from the poet Wordsworth,

Never to blend my pleasure or my pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives.

This glorious bird, the albatross, is the most beautiful and lovable object of the animate world which the adventurer meets with in all the South Pacific. Philosophers might take a lesson of it in æsthetics, for when on the wing it is the very beau ideal of beauty and grace. Seamen ought to love and prize it dearly, for the drear monotony of life at sea is often relieved by its always welcome appearance, and by watching with admiration, almost envy, its glorious gyrations and curves, and swoops in the elastic ocean of air, a free race-ground, where it has no competi

tor.

The capture of a whale, especially on the New Zealand whaling ground, and still further south, when eight hundred or a thousand miles from land, will bring them trooping from afar, as a carcass in Mexico or Louisiana will the turkey-buzzards. I have watched them singly keeping company with our ship for days together; the last living thing, without us, to be seen at nightfall, and the first the eye recognized again and saluted in the morning. Again, I have seen them gathered by hundreds when the cutting-in of a whale alongside allured them from a circuit of five hundred miles.