a 
CHARTER! 7b¥ 
DUCKINGS AND BOBBINGS 
5 bag 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 spar- 
ingly, 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 
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