newly
hatched chicks, all bill and feet, which nestled sedately at the edge
of a puddle of salt-water, where some small fish were swimming.

For a while excitement blinded, nay, deafened me. I tried to realize
that I was gazing upon the last individuals of an all but extinct
race--the sole survivors of the gigantic auk, which, for thirty years,
has been accounted an extinct creature.

I believe that I did not move muscle nor limb until the sun had gone
down and the crowding darkness blurred my straining eyes and blotted
the great, silent, bright-eyed birds from sight.

Even then I could not tear myself away from the enclosure; I listened
to the strange, drowsy note of the male bird, the fainter responses of
the female, the thin plaints of the chicks, huddling under her breast;
I heard their flipper-like, embryotic wings beating sleepily as the
birds stretched and yawned their beaks and clacked them, preparing for
slumber.

"If you please," came a soft voice from the door, "Mr. Halyard awaits
your company to dinner."

IV

I dined well--or, rather, I might have enjoyed my dinner if Mr.
Halyard had been eliminated; and the feast consisted exclusively of a
joint of beef, the pretty nurse, and myself. She was exceedingly
attractive--with a disturbing fashion of lowering her head and raising
her dark eyes when spoken to.

As for Halyard, he was unspeakable, bundled up in his snuffy shawls,
and making uncouth noises over his gruel. But it is only just to say
that his table was worth sitting down to and his wine was sound as a
bell.

"Yah!" he snapped, "I'm sick of this cursed soup--and I'll trouble you
to fill my glass--"

"It is dangerous for you to touch claret," said the pretty nurse.

"I might as well die at dinner as anywhere," he observed.

"Certainly," said I, cheerfully passing the decanter, but he did not
appear overpleased with the attention.

"I can't smoke, either," he snarled, hitching the shawls around until
he looked like Richard the Third.

However, he was good enough to shove a box of cigars at me, and I took
one and stood up, as the pretty nurse slipped past and vanished into
the little parlor beyond.

We sat there for a while without speaking. He picked irritably at the
bread-crumbs on the cloth, never glancing in my direction; and I,
tired from my long foot-tour, lay back in my chair, silently
appreciating one of the best cigars I ever smoked.

"Well," he rasped out at length, "