850 
BIRD-LIFE. 
Eider-down is the lightest, softest, and most delicate, 
to be found amongst aquatic birds. Three—or at the 
very outside four—pounds of it are amply sufficient to fill 
a large coverlet, and this coverlet is of itself enough to 
keep a person warm in the coldest northern winter; and 
as a pound of down is, at the present moment, worth, on 
the spot, four thalers of our money, it is not always so 
very expensive to sleep under an eider-down quilt. 
The Greenlanders make the skin of the King Duck 
(Somateria spectabilis ) into shirts, by leaving the down on 
the skins, and sewing them together with the down 
inside. 
The Eider Duck cannot be kept for any length of time 
in captivity; not that the necessary food cannot be 
obtained for them,—but the sea is wanting. In the hot 
summer days they fade gradually away: they lose their 
habitual liveliness ; do not remain so long in the water; 
dive seldom; often retire to land, where they will sit and 
sulk for hours in the same place, almost without moving; 
at the same time the appetite fails; they rapidly become 
thin, get weaker and weaker, and at last pass away 
without pain or struggle,—the true cause of this pining 
away being most probably home-sickness. 
