The Razorbills were fully as tame, sometimes leaving their crevices in the cliff and, with a hoarse croak, almost flying in my face, while the Puffins exhibited a spirit of combined indifference and independence, which plainly said, “This Rock is ours.” I sat down on a convenient ledge, and as the birds gathered about me in rows and groups on the border of the cliff, its ledges and projections, I seemed almost to be on speaking terms with them. So unusual and pleasing was this experience of having birds admit me at once to the inner circles of their society that I felt as though I had indeed been initiated into their ranks; and my enjoyment of the strange scene was heightened tenfold by the knowledge that I could satisfactorily record it. So I prepared the twin-lens—a camera exactly adapted to my present needs—and at a distance of twenty feet or thereabouts loaded and fired as many times as I pleased, with the birds none the wiser, and offering me each moment some new picture differing in composition from the last. Here was a triumph for the bird photographer. Who so nearly could have done justice to the subject? The taxidermist? One shot would have broken the spell? The artist? Whose pencil could compete with the lens in the convincing realism of its impression? But as yet I had seen only a fragment of the Rock. Climbing, therefore, from ledge to ledge, I reached a corner where an abrupt turn exposed a great expanse of perpendicular wall so inaccessible to man that it had become a favorite nesting site for the birds.^{82} Here were gathered Gannets, Murres, Razorbills, and Kittiwakes, distributed singly or in rows, according to the nature of the shelves or ledges on which they were nesting, the Gannets taking the widest, the Murres and Kittiwakes the narrowest ledges, while the Razorbills sought the more sheltered crevices. What noise and seeming confusion were here! A never-ceasing chorus in which the loud, grating _gor-r-r-rok, gor-r-rrok_ of the Gannets predominated, while the singularly human call of the Murres and the hoarse note of the Razorbills formed an accompaniment. Occasionally the Kittiwakes found cause for excitement, and hundreds of birds swooped downward from their nests and circled about, calling their rapidly uttered, distinctly enunciated _kít-ti-wake, kít-ti-wake_. [Illustration: 88. Puffins. × 2.] In addition to the great number of birds resting or nesting on the Rock, an endless procession of Gannets, Puffins, and Razorbills were flying around, but never over it. Unconsciously one expected a pause in this whirling throng, but although its numbers fluctuated, birds were always passing. The exposure of my last plate recalled me to a sense of other duties, and when I had returned to the little group of buildings with their inhabitants, I seemed to have been in another sphere.