"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." [Illustration: From col. Chi. Acad. Sciences. WILSONS PETREL. 2/3 Life-size Copyright by Nature Study Pub. Co., 1898, Chicago.] WILSON'S PETREL. Petrels are dispersed throughout all the seas and oceans of the world. Wilson's Stormy Petrel is one of the best known and commonest. It is to be met with nearly everywhere over the entire watery surface of the globe--far north in the icy regions of the Arctic seas and south to the sunny isles of southern oceans. It breeds in the months of March, April, May, June, July and August, according to the locality, in the northern latitudes of Europe, eastern and western North America. Dr. J. H. Kidder found it on Kerguelen Island, southeast of Africa. He had previously seen the birds at the sea coast off the Cape of Good Hope, and, on December 14, saw them out by day feeding on the oily matter floating away from the carcass of a sea-elephant. The birds, he says, frequent the rocky parts of hillsides, and flitting about like swallows, catch very minute insects. "Mother Carey's Chicken," as it is called by sailors, is widely believed to be the harbinger of bad weather, and many superstitions have grown out of the habit which they possess of apparently walking on the surface of the water as the Apostle St. Peter is recorded to have done. It is the smallest of the web-footed birds, yet few storms are violent enough to keep it from wandering over the waves in search of the food that the disturbed water casts to the surface. The Stormy Petrel is so exceedingly oily in texture, that the inhabitants of the Ferol islands draw a wick through its body and use it as a lamp. Wilson gives the following account of its habits while following a ship under sail: