"You bore a hole in the side of the egg, put in a blowpipe with a rubber bulb, and force the contents into a frying-pan. You can make fine omelet from the eggs of eiders, gulls, puffins and cormorants. Or you can mix flour with the eggs, add salt and butter, and make a nice pancake browned on both sides. "It tastes rather fishy, of course, but it's very filling, and when you come in after a long, hard run behind the dogs, or soaked to the skin from a boat-ride, it certainly is fine to fill up on cormorant omelet while you pleasantly roast yourself before the leaping flames of a driftwood bonfire. "A Labrador baby thinks that a gull's egg is as good as a stick of candy. "Puffins are lots of fun. You've read about the penguins in the Antarctic, where they have almost no other animals--how the penguins dive and swim and carry stones about, looking like solemn old gentlemen at a club in their dress suits. Well, the puffins are to Labrador what penguins are to the South Pole country. "Their burrows are two or three feet long, and the mother sits on a single dirty white egg in a straw nest. The birds have red, parrot-like bills, and they have pale grey faces with markings that make them look as if they were wearing spectacles. "Their bodies are chunky, and they shuffle about very clumsily. They don't like it a bit when people come where they have their nests. "But the razor-billed auk doesn't make any nest--it just lays its egg on the bare rock in the biting cold. There are very few auks left to-day, but there were lots of them when Audubon the naturalist visited Labrador ninety years ago. Audubon tells how a band of 'eggers' started out just like pirates. "All they cared about was to plunder every nest. "They went sneaking along from cove to cove, turning in sometimes at the little caves or finding shelter in an angle of the rocks when the sea ran too high. "While they were waiting they would fight and swear and drink. It's a wonder that the eggers didn't get drowned oftener, for their boats would be mended with strips of sealskin and the sails were patched like an old suit, and it looked as if a puff of wind would blow them over. "These eggers got out of their sailing ship into a rowboat they towed, so as to go to an island of sea-pigeons, or guillemots--because they couldn't get near enough in the larger vessel. "As they came to the rocks, the birds rose up in a screaming white cloud. The air was full of them, just as you've seen the gulls creaking and crying about the hull of an ocean steamer, hoping to pick up food thrown overboard. "But the mother birds stuck faithfully to the nests. It was the fathers and brothers that rose up in the air and made the noisy fuss. "All of a sudden--bang! the eggers discharged their guns in a volley right into the middle of the wheeling, screaming cloud of feathers overhead. "Some fell into the water, and the rest in terror flew about not knowing where to go or what to do.