drives him to eat mussels--but even then he likes
mud-snails much better.

The name fish-duck, which one hears occasionally, is much more
appropriate. The long slender bill, with its serrated edges fitting
into each other like the teeth of a bear trap, just calculated to
seize and hold a slimy wriggling fish, is quite enough evidence as to
the nature of the bird's food, even if one had not seen him fishing on
the lakes and rivers which are his summer home.

That same bill, by the way, is sometimes a source of danger. Once, on
the coast, I saw a shelldrake tying in vain to fly against the wind,
which flung rudely among some tall reeds near me. The next moment
Don, my old dog, had him. In a hungry moment he had driven his bill
through both shells of a scallop, which slipped or worked its way up
to his nostrils, muzzling the bird perfectly with a hard shell ring.
The poor fellow by desperate trying could open his mouth barely wide
enough to drink or to swallow the tiniest morsel. He must have been in
this condition a long time, for the bill was half worn through, and he
was so light that the wind blew him about like a great feather when he
attempted to fly.

Fortunately Don was a good retriever and had brought the duck in with
scarcely a quill ruffled; so I had the satisfaction of breaking his
bands and letting him go free with a splendid rush. But the wind was
too much for him; he dropped back into the water and went skittering
down the harbor like a lady with too much skirt and too big a hat in
boisterous weather. Meanwhile Don lay on the sand, head up, ears up,
whining eagerly for the word to fetch. Then he dropped his head, and
drew a long breath, and tried to puzzle it out why a man should go out
on a freezing day in February, and tramp, and row, and get wet to find
a bird, only to let him go after he had been fairly caught.

Kwaseekho the shelldrake leads a double life. In winter he may be
found almost anywhere along the Massachusetts coast and southward,
where he leads a dog's life of it, notwithstanding his gay
appearance. An hundred guns are roaring at him wherever he goes. From
daylight to dark he has never a minute to eat his bit of fish, or to
take a wink of sleep in peace. He flies to the ocean, and beds with
his fellows on the broad open shoals for safety. But the east winds
blow; and the shoals are a yeasty mass of tumbling breakers. They
buffet him about; they twist his gay feathers; they dampen his
p