But, chilled and clammed and starving, on the fifth day when he had crawled into his wet burrow for such small relief as it might offer from the ceaseless flailing without, he broached his bottle of cognac and drank a little, and found himself the better of it.
On the evening of the third day his hopes had risen with a slight slackening of the turmoil.

He was not sure if the gale had really abated, or if it was only that he was growing accustomed to it.

But under that belief, and the compulsion of a growling stomach, he crawled precariously round to the eastern end of the rock where the puffins had their holes, lying flat when the great gusts snatched at him as though they were bent on hurling him into the water, and gliding on again in the intervals.

And there, with a piece of his firewood he managed to extort half-a-dozen eggs from fiercely expostulating parents.

The end of his stick was bitten to fragments, but he got his eggs, and was amazed at the size of them compared with that of their producers.
The sight of the great wall of tumbled rocks on his right, and the sudden remembrance of his previous passage over it, set him wondering if it might not be possible to find better shelter in some of those fissures across which he had had to swing himself by the hands on the previous occasion.