III. THE DABCHICKS. I7I 



worth from twelve to fifteen shillings per 

 pound. Most of the eggs are taken and 

 pickled for winter consumption, one or two 

 only being left to hatch." 



But here, again, pulverulent Dr. Hartwig 

 leaves us untold who * consumes ' all these 

 pickled eggs of the cooing and downy-breasted 

 creatures ; (you observe, in passing, that an 

 eider duck coos instead of quacking, and must 

 be a sort of Sea-Dove,) or what addition their 

 price makes to the good old lady's feather- 

 nesting income of, as I calculate it, sixty to 

 seventy-five pounds a year, — all her twenty 

 years of skill and humanity and moderate 

 plucking having got no farther than that. 

 And not feeling myself able, on these im- 

 perfect data, to offer any recommendations to 

 the Icelandic government touching the duck 

 trade, I must end my present chapter with a 

 rough generalization of results. For a be- 

 ginning of which, the time having too clearly 

 and sadly come for me, as I have said in my 

 preface, to knit up, as far as I may, the loose 

 threads and straws of my ravelled life's work, 

 I reprint in this place the second paragraph of 

 the chapter on Vital Beauty in the second 



