furnished the famous purple dye of the ancients. It has a bitter, astringent taste, and is in consequence not eaten like its congener, the wilk. We have said that our favourite morning walk is invariably, if we can accomplish it, along the sea-beach; and hardly a day passes but we can show something interesting and new, picked up in these our littoral perambulations. After a storm particularly, we endeavour, whatever our other engagements, to devote an hour at least to a ramble along the shore, and it is rarely we return empty-handed: some curious waif or other, cast up by the storm, seldom fails to be forthcoming as the reward of our matutinal diligence. After a severe gale one morning last week, we found a dead kittiwake, but perfectly plump and fresh, lying on the top of a mass of drift tangle. The bird itself was no great rarity, for the kittiwake (Larus rissa, Linn.), a very pretty little gull, is common on all our shores, even in winter. The curious thing was that, on taking up the bird in our hand, we found that one of its feet was firmly held in the vice-like grasp of a large mussel, the mussel in its turn being anchored by its byssus to a tangle root (Laminaria digitata) of immense size. The poor kittiwake had evidently been fairly trapped: the case was clear. Walking along the beach at low-water, in search of food, it must have stepped inadvertently and unwittingly into the jaws, so to speak, of the open, or rather half-open, mussel, which, in resentment of the intrusion, instantly closing with a steel trap-like snap, held the poor bird firm and fast. There was no chance or hope of escape, and the unfortunate little gull, thus anchored to the bottom, was miserably drowned by the advancing tide. Its body would, to a certain extent, act as a float or buoy to the mussel and tangle root, which, thus loosened, the storm would readily dislodge, and cast up on the beach, even as we found it. Web-feet of all kinds are, of course, as liable to death in all its forms, natural and accidental, as any other animals, but we dare to say that in any accurate return of the vital statistics of sea-birds, death by drowning, Ophelia-like, would be found about the rarest. In more ways than one, therefore, was our dead kittiwake a curiosity of no every-day occurrence, though, in nineteen cases out of twenty, the passer-by would probably be content to kick it aside as a dead gull, and no more, if, indeed, he condescended to notice it at all. We were lately told an amusing story about a Fort-William man who lived some fifty years ago, and was in his day a great shore-searcher after storms, incited thereto, not exactly in the interests of science, but by more mundane and prosaic considerations. Summer and winter, all the year round, he searched the shores (Bhi'dh e g'iarraidh nan cladaichan, was the phrase) of Achintore and Drumarbin after every gale of wind, wandering ghost-like in the grey dawn by the margin