It was a day of days for beauty. While waiting, we sat watching the gambols of a flock of sea-gulls, whose gleaming white wings, as they circled round and round against a sky of clearest and tenderest blue, approaching each other to give loving salute with their bills, and then darting off only to return and repeat the act, uttering the while shrill notes of joy and delight, made a spectacle of exquisite beauty, and one that went to the invalid’s inmost heart, inducing an estatic sense of the possibilities of happiness in the mere fact of a natural and healthy existence. Though entranced by the scene no less than my companion, I did not fail to note the effect upon her, and the thought arose in my mind, “This is the best remedy of all she has yet had.” As we were thus gazing and feeling, a shot was fired from a boat containing some men and women, which, unperceived by us, had glided out from behind the opposite pier; and immediately one of the birds fell into the sea, where it lay fluttering in agony with a broken wing, while its companions fled away with harsh, discordant cries; and in one instant the whole bright scene was changed for us from one of innocence and joy into one of the darkest gloom and misery. It was a murder done in Eden, followed by the instant eclipse of all that made it Paradise. Mary was frantic. Her so lately injured organism gave way under the shock of such a revulsion of feeling. Her impulse was to throw herself into the sea to succour the wounded bird, and it was with difficulty that I restrained her; and only after giving vent to an agony of tears, and pouring on the shooting party a storm of reproaches, at the imminent risk of being given into custody as they landed bearing the bird, now dead, as a trophy, did I succeed in getting her back to the hotel. For the next twenty-four hours her state was one of raving mania.