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There was no sign that they were watching and praising God's hand working among the faculties of men, as more retired people do in much meaner things in the warmth which the eider-duck gives to her eggs by wrapping them in down from her own breast, and the punctuality with which the herring shoals pass by in May and October, making the sea glitter with life and light as they go.
We had spread them out upon the rocks, and dried them in the sun; for we had seen that, if we could only find something with which to sew them together, we might make all the clothing that we wanted. "The eider-duck skin is very warm, having, besides its thick coat of feathers, a heavy underlayer of soft warm down, which, as I told you before, the ducks pick off to line their nests with.
On this occasion, my uncle partly confided in Hans, the eider-duck hunter, and gave him to understand that it was his intention to continue his exploration of the volcano to the last possible limits. Hans listened calmly, and then nodded his head. To go there, or elsewhere, to bury himself in the bowels of the earth, or to travel over its summits, was all the same to him!
Rollo glanced at his comrade, in a sort of droll assurance that it could be no voice from the grave, no ghostly inhabitant of a cave, who could require to have such a matter explained. He then condescendingly told her that when the eggs of the eider-duck are taken she lays more; and this twice over, before giving up in despair.
The sky, nearly always gray, gave tones of polished steel to the ice of the fiord. Perchance some ancient eider-duck crossed the expanse, trusting to the warm down beneath which dream, in other lands, the luxurious rich, little knowing of the dangers through which their luxury has come to them.
The finest down is that with which they line their nests at first; it is of a dark grey colour. The Icelanders take away this down, and the first nest of eggs. For the second time every thing is taken from her; and not until she has a third time lined the nest with her down is the eider-duck left in peace.
Of the two dozen species of American wild-ducks, none has a wider celebrity than that known as the canvas-back; even the eider-duck is less thought of, as the Americans care little for beds of down.
Puffin, guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, cormorant, shag, fulmar petrel, storm petrel perhaps, kittiwake-gull, common gull, eider-duck, oyster-catcher, after their kind, had the great, cliff-piled, inlet-studded, rock-dotted stretch of coast practically to themselves to themselves in their thousands.
Hans, despite everything he could say to the contrary, quitted Hamburg; the man to whom we owed so much would not allow us to pay our deep debt of gratitude. He was taken with nostalgia; a love for his Icelandic home. "Farval," said he, one day, and with this one short word of adieu, he started for Reykjavik, which he soon reached in safety. We were deeply attached to our brave eider-duck hunter.
We are visited in summer by swans, geese, ducks, eagles, hawks, ravens, owls, robins, and swallows. The eider-duck, so much prized for its down, is found in considerable numbers. The geese are of a most inferior kind, owing, I suppose, to the poor feeding the country affords; when they arrive in summer the ice is often still solid, when they betake themselves to the hills, and feed on berries.
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