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142 the resemblance can be understood. Its affinities with the oyster-catcher are (unless it is the other way about) less close; yet some part of the piping of the latter bird reminded me strongly of the "clamour," as it is called, of the former one. Sometimes, but more rarely, the mournful "too-ee, too-ee, too-ee" of the curlew is followed by a note as mournful, but louder and more abrupt. This sounded to my ear something like "chur-wer—whi-wee," but, of course, all such renderings are arbitrary, and more or less fanciful.

One of the strangest sounds that came to me on that lonely island was the courting-note of the male eider-duck. This varies a good deal, not in the sound, which is always the same, but in the duration and division of it. Sometimes it is one long-drawn, soft "oh" or "oo," more generally, perhaps, this is syllabled into "oh-hoo" or "ah-oo," and often there is a much longer as well as very distinct and powerful "hoo-oooooo." The sound seems always to be on the point of catching, yet just to miss, the human intonation, sometimes suggesting a soft (though often loud) mocking laugh, at others a slightly ironical or surprised ejaculation. But this human element only just trembles upon it and is gone. Rousing for a moment the sense of man's proximity with its attendant associations, these vanish almost in the forming, and are replaced by a feeling of unutterable loneliness and wildness. For what recalls, yet is far other, enforces the sense of the absence of that which it recalls. Yet this feeling changed too, or, rather, with it there came another as of the unseen world, also, I think, comprehensible, since what is