gloss. The ground-colour varies from
white, very faintly tinged with pink, to a delicate pink, and they are
profusely speckled, spotted, blotched, or clouded with various shades
of red, brownish red, and purple. The markings vary much in character,
extent, and intensity of colour. There seem to be two leading types,
with, however, almost every possible intermediate variety of markings.
The one is thickly speckled over its whole surface with minute dots
of reddish purple, no dot much bigger than the point of a pin, and
no portion of the ground-colour exceeding 0.1 in diameter free from
spots. In these eggs the specklings are most dense, as a rule,
throughout a broad irregular zone surrounding the large end, and this
zone is thickly underlaid with irregular ill-defined streaky clouds
of dull inky purple. In some eggs of this type, the smaller end is
comparatively free from specks. In the other type, the surface of the
egg is somewhat sparingly, but boldly, blotched and splashed, first
with deep umber, chocolate, or purple-brown, and, secondly, with spots
and clouds of faint inky purple, recalling not a little the style of
markings of the eggs of _Rhynchops albicollis_. Then there are eggs
partly speckly and partly blotched, some in which the markings are all
rich red and where no secondary pale purple clouds are observable,
and others again in which all the markings are dull purplish brown.
Generally it may be said that the markings have a tendency to form a
cap or zone at the large end.

A nest of three eggs recently obtained from Mussoorie were more richly
coloured than any I have yet seen, and were decidedly glossy. The
ground-colour is a rich rosy pink, boldly, but sparingly, blotched
and spotted with deep maroon, underlaid by clouds and spots of pale
purple, which appear as if beneath the surface of the shell. In all
the eggs the markings are far more numerous at the large end, where in
one they form a huge confluent maroon-coloured patch, mottled lighter
and darker.

An egg recently obtained in Cashmere on the 20th June was a somewhat
elongated oval, more or less compressed towards one end; a delicate
glossy white ground with a faint pink tinge; a rich zone of
reddish-purple spots and specks round the large end; a few similar
markings scattered sparingly over the rest of the surface of the egg,
and a multitude of very faint streaks and clouds of very _pale_ inky
purple underlying the primary markings.

In length