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