"Jim said you'd like to see the birds, sonny," said his father, taking him in his strong arms, and holding him up near to the glass: "so I said he could fetch you. Look! do you see them flying against the glass? It's the light as brings them these stormy nights. They know they'll get perching-room somewhere round, if they get nothing else. See their white wings flitting to and fro, Pat? Jim says in the morning we shall pick up a score or so of dead birds in the gallery, as have dashed their lives out flying straight against the glass." Pat looked and began to see, for at first his eyes were dazzled. It was just as his father had said: outside the glass house were multitudes of wild sea birds, flitting to and fro like ghosts in the black darkness, and every now and then dashing themselves against the strong dome of glass with a noise which told of the violence of the effort. There seemed to the child to be an endless myriad of white and grey birds circling round his sea-girt home, and he looked at them in wonder and awe, for he had never before seen so strange a sight. "Do they want to get in, father?" he asked softly. "Oh, let us open the door and take them in. They are frightened at the storm. Why should we not let them come in and warm themselves here?" "They would only be worse scared than they are, Pat," answered his father, "and would fly into the lamp and hurt themselves and it. Poor foolish things! they don't know what they come for themselves; it's just the light attracts them. We'll get feathers enough to stuff a pillow for your mother to-morrow, if Jim is right about what we shall find outside." But Pat was quite unhappy about the poor foolish wild birds driven seawards by the gale, and coming to the lighthouse, as it were, for shelter. "Let me go outside and see them there," he said; and Jim wrapped him up warmly and carried him out for a few minutes. It was a still stranger sight out there to see the strange antics of the bewildered birds, and to hear their cries and screams, which made Pat shiver in spite of himself, remembering the stories his mother sometimes told him on winter evenings of the "banshee" and its wailing cry. He was dreadfully sorry for the birds, but they would not let him come near them, and he saw that nothing could be done for them. "I suppose God knows about them," he said at last, with a great sigh. "If He cares for sparrows, I suppose He cares for sea-gulls, too. If He knows, I suppose we need not mind very much. But I should have liked to take them in and feed them, and make them warm and comfortable. They sound so very sad; but perhaps God will comfort them best." And then Jim carried the child down to his warm bed again, and he fell asleep, thinking of the birds and their strange noises and ways.