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ver waddles, sometimes, for a minute or two, 'toddles,' and now and then looks more like a ball than a bird. For the most part, being clever, they are also brave, and would be as tame as any other chickens, if we would let them. They are mostly shore birds, living at the edge of irregularly broken water, either streams or sea; and the representative of the whole group with which we will begin is the mysterious little water-ouzel, or 'oiselle,' properly the water-blackbird,--Buffon's 'merle d'eau'--for ouzel is the classic and poetic word for the blackbird, or ouzel-_cock_, "so black of hue," in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' Johnson gives it from the Saxon 'osle'; but in Chaucer it must be understood simply as the feminine of oiseau. The bird in question might, however, be more properly called, as Bewick calls it, 'water pyot,' or water magpie, for only its back and wings are black,--its head brown, and breast snow white. [20] Or in French, 'embonpoint.' 90. And now I must, once for all, get over a difficulty in the description of birds' costume. I can always describe the neck-feathers, as such, when birds have any neck to speak of; but when, as the majority of dabchicks, they have not any,--instead of talking of 'throat-feathers' and 'stomach-feathers,' which both seem to me rather ugly words, I shall call the breast feathers the 'chemisette,' and all below them the 'bodice.' I am now able, without incivility, to distinguish the two families of Water-ouzel. Both have white chemisettes, but the common water-ouzel (Cinclus aquaticus of Gould) has a white bodice, and the other a black one, the bird being called therefore, in ugly Greek, 'Melanogaster,' 'black-stomached.' The black bodice is Norwegian fashion--the white, English; and I find that in Switzerland there is an intermediate Robin-ouzel, with a red bodice: but the ornithologists are at variance as to his 'specific' existence. The chemisette is always white. 91. However dressed, and wherever born, the Ouzel is essentially a mountain-torrent bird, and, Bewick says, may be seen perched on a stone in the midst of a stream, in a continual _dipping_ motion, or short curtsey often repeated, while it is watching for its food, which consists of small fishes and insects,--water insects, that is to say, caught mostly at the bottom; many-legged and shrimpy things, according to Gould's plate. The popular tradition that it can walk under the water has been denied by
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