"The Stormy Petrel, mamma, is a very interesting bird. I should like very much to be in a ship and see him walking on the water, wouldn't you?"

Mamma, who thought of the apostle St. Peter, shook her head.

"You must be mistaken, Bobbie," said she. "I never heard of a bird that could walk on the water."

"Well, that's what my magazine says," replied Bobbie, "and I am sure Birds ought to know. Listen!" and Bobbie, stopping to spell a word now and then, and to ask the meaning of many, managed to inform his mother what the Stormy Petrel had to say about himself.

"Though I am the smallest of the web-footed birds I am a great traveler," read Bobbie. "Everywhere over the entire surface of the watery globe you will find members of my order; far north in the Arctic seas and away down in the Southern oceans. We love the sea, and the food which is thrown up by the waves. Anything oily or greasy we particularly like. No matter how stormy the weather, nor how high the billows roll, you will see us little fellows, with outstretched wings, sweeping along in the hollow trough of the sea. From one side of a ship to the other, now far ahead, then a great way behind, catching up easily with the ship though making ten knots an hour."

"What is a knot, mamma?" querried Bobbie.

"A knot means a sailors' mile. An engineer says his locomotive runs at the rate of so many miles an hour; a seaman says so many 'knots.' A knot is something more than our English mile."

"The sailors call us 'Mother Carey's Chickens.' Because we walk and run on the surface of the water they think us uncanny, foretelling bad weather, or something else bad for the crew, when—let me whisper it into your ear—it is our outstretched wings which uphold us, our wings as well as our broad, flat feet.

There is something else I want to tell you though before I close. Think of making a lamp out of a bird's body! That is what they do with a Stormy Petrel's body on a certain island in the Atlantic ocean. They find our carcass so oily from the food we eat, that all they have to do is to draw a wick through our body, light it, and lo they have a lamp."