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 CHAPTER IV

DUCKINGS AND BOBBINGS

HE eider-duck is here, but not its beauty, for at this fag-end of the summer and breeding season the males have all departed, and it is the sober-coloured female, either alone or accompanied by her little brood of ducklings, that one meets now along the shores of the island. True there must be males in their just proportion among the latter, but at this tender age—the age of fluff and innocence—the sex of a bird is in abeyance—a world that is not yet begun. A pretty thing it is to see such little family parties coasting quietly along the shore and following all its bends and indentations. There is one such now—mother and three—coming "slowly up this way," like the spring, though not so slowly as the spring, or anything at all spring or summer-like, comes to these islands. They are feeding, apparently, upon the brown seaweed that clothes, as with a mantle, each rock and smooth stone that lies upon the shallow bottom along a gently shelving beach—making a continuous fringe which is but just submerged at low tide. In this the heads of the young ones are continually buried, but the mother eats more sparingly, and seems all-in-all happy to be thus with her family. Now as the eider-duck is certainly very much of an animal feeder—supposed, indeed, to be 26