waiting for the chick to wake up. He, it will be remembered, was the plain bird; and such are very greatly in the majority. The white mark round the eye impairs this look of intelligence. It is lost in strangeness, and the bird so adorned has something the appearance of one of those queer kind of demons that one sees in Japanese drawings. The eye itself is black.
The chick, therefore, has had two good fish—one a particularly large one—within twenty minutes. There is now an interval of near three hours, and then the father flies in again with yet another fish—a very long sand-eel it looks like, even bigger than the last—and the chick seizing it as it is let drop, before it touches the ledge, it disappears by a process which looks like magic. They are like little bag-purses, these guillemot chicks, and when they are full of money—i.e. fishes—it is difficult to think that there is room for anything more inside them—anatomy seems out of the question. Just before this, this particular one has lain in the queerest way under his mother's wing, flat upon the rock, with his legs stretched straight out behind him as one sometimes sees dogs lie. He has lain like this several times altogether, but never for long at a time. Now, after his surfeit, he has retired again. By the way, the inside of the little chick's mouth is pinky-flesh-coloured merely, whereas that of the old bird is of a fine lemon. Why should we, in so many species, find this difference in coloration between young and old in such a region
