“How dreadfully the wind blows!” said Agnes, as she wrapped her cloak more closely round her.
“The wind always blows at the Needles, miss,” observed the guide.
“And are those the Needles?” cried Agnes, as they descended the down low enough to catch a view of these celebrated rocks. “I declare they look more like thimbles.”
“That remark has been made before,” said Mrs. Merton; “and yet they appear to me as little like thimbles as needles. The fact is, I think that they are more like mile-stones than anything belonging to the work-table; or, what bears a closer resemblance to them, they are like the awkward stone stiles I have seen, when I was a girl, in Gloucestershire.”
They had now reached the point beyond which Mrs. Merton did not wish to go; and she sat down on the turf, while the guide helped Agnes sufficiently far down the cliffs to enable her to see the birds sitting on their ledges of rock, uttering strange sharp cries, and then chattering, as though they were talking to each other. There were Cormorants, and Gulls, and Puffins, and Guillemots, with several smaller kinds, each sitting on its separate rock, and alternately muttering and shouting, till Agnes’s head grew giddy, and she begged the man to take her back to her mamma.
“Do not most of the birds generally leave you about this season?” said Mrs. Merton to the guide, when they returned.
“They are later than usual this year, ma’am,” replied the man. “It was a late summer.”
“I thought there had been five Needles, mamma,” said Agnes; “and I can see only three.”
“There are five, miss,” said the man, “but you can very seldom see them all at once, unless you’r on the water.”
“I wonder how these rocks ever came to be called the Needles?” observed Agnes,—“since they are not conical.”