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 almost, yet not quite, human must needs suggest fays, elves, elementals, and all their company. I loved the sound. If not quite music, it was most softly harmonious, and always, from first to last, brought into my mind with strange insistency, those lines in the Tempest:

Then, of course, I was on Prospero's island, though, heaven knows, this bleak northern one was little like it. Thus can some poor bird that we murder, by an association merely, or called-up image, as well as by actual song,

It was some little time before I could be quite sure to what bird this strange note belonged. It seemed too poetical for a duck, though, indeed, an eider-duck is the poetry of the family. Also, it was difficult to locate, seeming to bear but little relation to the place or distance at which it was uttered. But I soon found that whenever there were eider-ducks I heard the note, whereas I never did when they were nowhere about. At last—quite close in a little bay, as though they had come there to show me—I "tore out the heart of their mystery." It was a lovely sight. Even the female eider-duck, sober brown though she be, has a most