Now and then a land-bird has flown on board, driven to sea probably by the gale; and so fatigued as hardly to be able to rise again upon the wing. Yesterday morning a large curlew came struggling down the wind, and seemed to have just sufficient strength to reach the vessel. He attempted to alight on the main yard, but failed and dropped heavily into the long-boat, where he suffered himself to be taken without an attempt to escape. He must have been on the wing two or three days without food, for we were at least two hundred miles from land. His heart was throbbing hard through his ruffled feathers, and he held his head up with difficulty. He was passed aft; but, while I was deliberating on the best means for resuscitating and fitting him to get on the wing again, the captain had taken him from me and handed him over to the cook, who had his head off before I could remember French enough to arrest him. I dreamed all that night of the man "that shot the albatross." The captain relieved my mind, however, by telling me that he had tried repeatedly to preserve them, and that they died invariably in a few hours. The least food, in their exhausted state, swells in their throats and suffocates them. Poor Curlew! there was a tenderness in one breast for him at least--a feeling I have the melancholy satisfaction to know, fully reciprocated by the bird himself--that seat of his affections having been allotted to me for my breakfast the morning succeeding his demise. OCT. 29.--We have a tandem of whales ahead. They have been playing about the ship an hour, and now are coursing away to the east, one after the other, in gallant style. If we could only get them into traces now, how beautiful it would be to stand in the foretop and drive a degree or two, on a summer sea! It would not be more wonderful, _de novo_, than the discovery of the lightning-rod, or navigation by steam! And by the way, the sight of these huge creatures has made me realize, for the first time, the extent to which the sea has _grown_ upon my mind during the voyage. I have seen one or two whales, exhibited in the docks, and it seemed to me always that they were monsters--out of proportion, entirely, to the range of the ocean. I had been accustomed to look out to the horizon from land (the radius, of course, as great as at sea), and, calculating the probable speed with which they would compass the intervening space, and the disturbance they would make in doing it, it appeared that in any considerable numbers, they would occupy more than their share of notice and sea-room. Now--after sailing five days, at two hundred miles a day, and not meeting a single vessel--it seems to me that a troop of a thousand might swim the sea a century and chance to be never crossed, so endlessly does this eternal horizon open and stretch away!