tortoises which seem of immemorial age, and are coated with seaweed and
the slime of the ocean. If there are any birds, it is the strange and
heavy penguin, the passing albatross, or the Mother Cary's chicken, which
has been called the humming bird of ocean, and here finds a place for its
young. By night these birds come for their repose; at earliest dawn they
take wing and hover over the sea, leaving the isle deserted. The only busy
or beautiful life which always surrounds it is that of a myriad species of
fish, of all forms and shapes, and often more gorgeous than any
butterflies in gold and scarlet and yellow.

Once set foot on such an island and you begin at once to understand the
legends of enchantment which ages have collected around such spots. Climb
to its heights, you seem at the masthead of some lonely vessel, kept
forever at sea. You feel as if no one but yourself had ever landed there;
and yet, perhaps, even there, looking straight downward, you see below you
in some crevice of the rock a mast or spar of some wrecked vessel,
encrusted with all manner of shells and uncouth vegetable growth. No
matter how distant the island or how peacefully it seems to lie upon the
water, there may be perplexing currents that ever foam and swirl about it
--currents which are, at all tides and in the calmest weather, as dangerous
as any tempest, and which make compass untrustworthy and helm powerless.
It is to be remembered also that an island not only appears and disappears
upon the horizon in brighter or darker skies, but it varies its height and
shape, doubles itself in mirage, or looks as if broken asunder, divided
into two or three. Indeed the buccaneer, Cowley, writing of one such
island which he had visited, says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley's
Enchanted Isle, for we having had a sight of it upon several points of the
compass, it appeared always in so many different forms; sometimes like a
ruined fortification; upon another point like a great city."