Show DREW admiration OF alpine rd compelled thought of writer and philosopher while among the dark piney krecl apices of the chartreuse hills one day the fanous john ruskin saw for the third time what he thought the most wonderful of all alpine birds a gray fluttering stealthy creature about the size of a sparrow but of colder gray and more graceful which haunts the sides of the fiercest torrents he wrote there is something more strange in it than in the seagull that seems a powerful creature and the of the sea not of a kind so adverse so hopelessly destructive but this small creature s lent tender and light almost like a moth in its low and irregular flight almost touch ing with its wings the crests of waves that would overthrow a granite wall and haunting the hollows of the black cold rocks that are continio conti nil ally shaken by their sp ay has per haps the nearest approach to the look of a spiritual existence I 1 know in ani mal life |