"When we got fairly off against the island I fired a gun at it: and such a fluttering and screaming you can't imagine. The great snow-banks shook, trembled, loosened, and became all alive, whirling away into the air like drifts in a nor'wester. Millions of birds went up, wheeling and zigzagging about, their white bodies and blacktipped wings crossing and recrossing and mixing together into a thick grayish-white haze above us. "'You're right, Skipper,' says Wilson to me; Nature is better than books.' "And from that time he was on deck as much as his health would allow of, and took a deal of notice of everything new and uncommon. But, for all that, the poor fellow was so sick, and pale, and peaking, that we all thought we should have to heave him overboard some day or bury him in Labrador moss." "But he did n't die after all, did he?" said I. "Die? No!" cried the Skipper; "not he!" "And so your fishing voyage really cured him?" "I can't say as it did, exactly," returned the Skipper, shifting his quid from one cheek to the other, with a sly wink at the Doctor. "The fact is, after the doctors and the old herb-women had given him up at home, he got cured by a little black-eyed French girl on the Labrador coast." "A very agreeable prescription, no doubt," quoth the Doctor, turning to me. "How do you think it would suit your case?" "It does n't become the patient to choose his own nostrums," said I, laughing. "But I wonder, Doctor, that you have n't long ago tested the value of this by an experiment upon yourself." "Physicians are proverbially shy of their own medicines," said he.