"Why should I be?" he rasped; "I pay that young woman for my
irritability; it's a bargain between us."

"In your domestic affairs," I said, "there is nothing that interests
me. I came to see those auks."

"You probably believe them to be razor-billed auks," he said,
contemptuously. "But they're not; they're great auks."

I suggested that he permit me to examine them, and he replied,
indifferently, that they were in a pen in his backyard, and that I was
free to step around the house when I cared to.

I laid my rifle and pack on the veranda, and hastened off with mixed
emotions, among which hope no longer predominated. No man in his
senses would keep two such precious prizes in a pen in his backyard, I
argued, and I was perfectly prepared to find anything from a puffin to
a penguin in that pen.

I shall never forget, as long as I live, my stupor of amazement when I
came to the wire-covered enclosure. Not only were there two great
auks in the pen, alive, breathing, squatting in bulky majesty on their
sea-weed bed, but one of them was gravely contemplating two newly
hatched chicks, all bill and feet, which nestled sedately at the edge
of a puddle of salt-water, where some small fish were swimming.

For a while excitement blinded, nay, deafened me. I tried to realize
that I was gazing upon the last individuals of an all but extinct
race--the sole survivors of the gigantic auk, which, for thirty years,