British show, the Crystal Palace, was giving them the leading 

 prizes year after year, and the most prominent English breeders 

 asserted their superiority as a distinctive and pure type. 



One man here states that he does not know whether the 

 tinted-e|^ layers are better than the others or not, because he 

 has ducks that lay tinted eggs early in the season and mostly 

 white eggs later on. This man has bred ducks many years. Any 

 one who has bred them but a single season knows that ducks, 

 at the beginning of the lay, often give eggs covered with a coat- 

 ing or "veil" which does not belong to the shell, and which 

 washes off ! A simple coating which can be removed is quite dif- 

 ferent from a shell filled with green coloring matter. I have, 

 indeed, known a duck which had laid strictly white eggs for an 

 entire season, to lay blue eggs five or six days in succession, once 

 during the next season. But this does not stamp her as anything 

 but a white-egg duck; for there was evidently something tempo- 

 rarily wrong, either with her digestive or her laying functions, 

 and she was, normally, strictly a white-egg bird. 



All the strength of the American Standard contingent, and 

 that of one of the clubs is thrown against the Cumberland-Fairy- 

 Fawns ; which are the union of two penciled Runner bloods of the 

 highest type known : one strictly white-egg, the other laying some 

 green eggs. Yet facts are made public, week by week, which 

 show that the broad claims for white egg strains now made by 

 nearly all American Standard breeders, must be taken with 

 much salt. 



A breeder who says that he has tried both parti-colored 

 varieties, and would prefer the American Standard ducks if 

 they were as good egg producers as the penciled, gives his ex- 

 perience in very vivid language, almost extravagant. I do nor 

 know him personally, but he has all the prestige of the American 

 Poultry Association behind him; since he is a licensed judge 

 and no judge can be licensed without other good judges to 



39 



