By breakfast the rail was a quiet row of white chests. Each seagull faced the lamp, offered a small nod to a passing boat, and only then hung in the air as if a breeze had asked them to wait.
We asked at the kiosk. "They do not rush the wind," said a woman with a paper cone of warm seeds. "The first one greets the lamp, the next one waits, and the hats along the quay stay exactly where they were put." A pencil note in the thanks book read: "My scarf did not travel. The class deserves a biscuit."
The keeper pinned a courteous card to the post: morning hours only, one hover to a breeze, seed tickets returned to the railing after the lesson. The boats, he added, prefer to bow from the water and not to skip the line.