118 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
intricate channels imaginable, and finally reached an 
island hidden by shoals and salt-marshes, but whose 
farther beach faced the ocean. There, in a space 
about four hundred by one hundred feet, we found 
seventy nests of tern, containing a hundred and 
sixty-five eggs. Most of the nests contained two 
eggs, some three, and one, four. The nests were 
merely hollows in the sand, lined with bits of pure- 
white shell. The usual color of the eggs was a blue- 
green background, heavily blotched with chocolate 
blotches, although I found one egg of a light green, 
speckled all over with light-red specks. In only one 
nest was there a young bird. The little chick lay 
flat in the burning sun, while overhead hung the 
mother tern, pearl-white with black-tipped wings, 
making a grinding, scolding note. The young tern 
was downy like a duckling, and had tiny red feet 
and a pink beak tipped with black. We put up a 
stake to mark the nest, and later in the day, when 
we came back to photograph it, we found that the 
little tern had crawled out, followed the shadow 
which the stick had made, and lay with its head in 
the scanty shade far away from the nest. 
We met other rare water-fowl that blazing day. 
We saw the rare piping plover, whose nest I was 
afterwards to find in Upper Canada, black skimmers, 
with their strange slant-cut beaks, black tern, least 
tern, loons, black-bellied plover, and everywhere 
throughout the salt-meadows enormous great-blue 
herons. 
This was the last trip of our quartette for the 
