We put off in the boat, and just halfway from the cutter Claude gave a start, and the women a scream, as the enormous brute quietly raised his head and shoulders out of the water ten yards off, with a fish kicking in his mouth, and the water running off his nose, to take a deliberate stare at us, after the fashion of seals, whose ruling passion is curiosity. The sound of a musical instrument, the sight of a man bathing—anything, in short, which their small wits cannot explain at first sight, is enough to make them forget all their cunning, and thrust their heads suicidally into any danger; and even so it fared with the ‘black man,’ as the girls, in their first terror, declared him to be. Some fellow’s gun went off—of itself I should like to believe—but the whole charge disappeared into his sleek round visage, knocking the mackerel from between his teeth; and he turned over, a seven-foot lump of lifeless blubber. ‘Wretch!’ cried Claude, as we dragged the seal into the boat, where he lay with his head and arms hanging helplessly over the bows, like a sea-sick alderman on board a Margate steamer. ‘What excuse can he give for such a piece of wanton cruelty?’ ‘I assure you his skin and oil are very valuable.’ ‘Pish!—Was he thinking of skin and oil when he pulled the trigger? or merely obeying the fleshly lust of destructiveness—the puppet of two bumps on the back of his head?’ ‘My dear Claude, man is the microcosm; and as the highest animal, the ideal type of the mammalia, he, like all true types, comprises in himself the attributes of all lower species. Therefore he must have a tiger-vein in him, my dear Claude, as well as a beaver-vein and a spider-vein; and no more shame to him. You are a butterfly; that good fellow a beast of prey; both may have their own work to do in this age just as they had in the old ones; and if you do not like that explanation, all I can say is, I can sympathise with you and with him too. Homo sum—humani nihil a me alienum puto. Trim the boat, lads, or the seal will swamp us, and, like Samson, slay more in his death than ever he slew in his life.’