THE WATER BABIES
for there are eighty miles of codbank, and food for all the poor folk in the land. That is what Tom will see, and perhaps you and I shall see it, too. And then we shall not be sorry because we cannot get a Gairfowl to stuff, much less find Gairfowl enough to drive them into stone pens and slaughter them, as the old Norsemen did, or drive them on board along a plank till the ship was victualled with them, as the old English and French rovers used to do, of whom dear old Hakluyt tells: but we shall remember what Mr. Tennyson says—how
"The old order changeth, giving place to the new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways."
And now Tom was all agog to start for Shiny Wall; but the petrels said no. They must go first to Allfowlsness, and wait there for the great gathering of all the seabirds, before they start for their summer breeding-places far away in the Northern Isles; and there they would be sure to find some birds which were going to Shiny Wall: but where Allfowlsness was, he must promise never to tell, lest men should go there and shoot the birds, and stuff them, and put them into stupid museums, instead of leaving them to play and breed and work in Mother Carey's water-garden, where they ought to be.
So where Allfowlsness is nobody must know; and all that is to be said about it is, that Tom waited there many days, and as he waited, he saw a very curious sight. On the rabbit burrows on the shore there gathered
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