THE REWARD OF GREED.
A tragic and fantastic example of the abnormal appetite of the species, as of the genus, has astonished the fishermen at Brightlingsea. Enormous quantities of sprats had been caught ; and the birds descended, like Virgil's harpies, on one boat load left on the shore. When a day later the fishermen came to clear their boat, they found it full of dead gulls. The theory was that the gulls, being too fully gorged to fly, died of cold. The explanation one would say, is certainly wrong, for the gull is not very sensitive to cold, and walks about the ice like a native. Now, the sprat is the richest of all fish foods as our dietetic analysts have shown, and probably the birds died as in the legend died a king of England, directly of a surfeit of fish. Such suicide is not uncommon. Many a bird has been killed by trying to swallow too big a fish. Hun- dreds of sheep have died from eating an excess of clover- " swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw "—like Milton's ecclesiastics.
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