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IN THE SHETLANDS
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the great skua, or the herring or black-backed gull, may be the authors of these tragic occurrences, but I have not seen any of them kill anything yet—not even young birds. However it be, many a scene of ruthless rapine is enacted on these black rocks, beneath these great cliffs, by the surge of the sullen sea. None see it; most, I verily believe, forget it. But it is there, and always there; and so, in ghastly and horrible multiplication, through the whole wide world. How unpitying, how godless is nature, when man, with his disguising smiles and honey-out-of-vinegar extractions, is not there to gloze and apologise, to strew his "smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs"!
