“What is that, Antoine?” he asked. “A booby?”
For he remembered having read somewhere about a booby having been the name of a sea-bird and the word had stuck in his memory.
“A booby, oh no, oh no,” said Antoine, with a doubling of the negative that was a marked characteristic in his speech, “no booby as far north as this! It is one of the sea-gulls, a black-backed gull.”
“I thought all birds that flew over the sea were sea-gulls,” remarked Perry.
“Not at all, not at all,” replied the other. “I show you in a minute.” He paused. “See?” he added, pointing to a bird a little smaller than the gull that had attracted Perry’s attention. “That is a cousin of the ‘booby.’ It is a gannet. If you look, you can see that his neck is longer and that his chest looks different from the black-backed gull. That is because he has a long breastbone and the ribs are set in at a different angle, so, when he plunges into the water with a big splash after a fish, he does not hurt himself when he hits the water. You can dive?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Perry, “I’m quite a decent swimmer.”
“You know that when you dive, if you hit the water ‘smack,’ it hurts?”
“You bet it does.”
“The gannet drops suddenly, and so the pointed breastbone does for the diving bird what you do when you put your hands in front of you. It divides the water.”
“That ought to make them good fish-catchers, I should think.”