180 WILD LIFE AT HOME. 



It is interesting to watch a periwinkle feeding 

 upon a piece of seaweed, and in doing so the ob- 

 server is irresistibly reminded of its similarity to a 

 common land snail. Although the former can live 

 out of the sea, for a limited time at any rate, and 

 travel over rocks that are out of the water, the 

 latter cannot live in salt water. On the sandy beach 

 near Bamborough Castle the high-water mark is in- 

 dicated by a line of beautifully coloured snail shells. 



Limpets sometimes live above high-water mark, 

 but for how long it is difficult to say. However, 

 I have seen them there a sufficient length of time 

 to prove that they can manage to exist without 

 being washed by the sea twice a day. 



It has recently been stated that all eels are 

 bred in the sea, and that they exactly reverse the 

 migratory breeding movements of the salmon ; but 

 how their young ones, when only five or six inches 

 long and as thick as the stem of a churchwarden 

 clay pipe, travel up a hundred and fifty miles of 

 river, and surmount such obstacles as waterfalls that 

 tax the best leaping energies of a trout, I cannot 

 conceive. We used to have a few eels away up in 

 the dale becks of Yorkshire, where I have " gud- 

 dled " them two pounds in weight when a boy 

 and I always thought when I saw young ones 

 playing about on \\ sandbank that they had been 

 bred there. 



Probably the very commonest creatures to be 

 met with between the tide marks o( any rocky 



