He had been skinning the seal. Much as less powerful men skin a rabbit, he had been tearing the coat, grey and damp, from the smooth pale body. A stone wall, five foot broad at the base and crowned with tamarisk bushes, is what in Cornwall is called a hedge. It is at least a shelter from the wind, and Dick Bennett had been careful to set the furnace in a lew corner. The furze bushes burnt with a crackle and above them the sea-coal smouldered slowly in large red lumps. The air in the yard was fresh but still, and through it, a warm reek, rose the smell of blood. It rose to Byron’s nostrils, affecting him as it affects the children of the wild, rousing in him that primitive, long-forgotten, but deathless passion which claims survival as its right and, battling before the hosts that wait to be called across the threshold, stakes its life. Between his hands hung the limp body and he wrenched at the skin in a growing fury of impatience. His blunt dark-skinned fingers were foul and, as the sealskin slipped he noticed that a trickle of thickening blood had run down his palm on to the wrist. He stared at this from between narrowed eyelids for a second, then, stooping his big head, licked it away. The taste of it, salt on his tongue, further affected an equilibrium already unstable; and the beast which slumbers behind the arras of our civilization, which stirs with a faint growl at every shaking of that decent cover, that savage incalculable beast of the long past, awoke. The blood-lust rose in him. He forgot the presence of the bullock-man, the time, the place, everything but a sudden overmastering need. Something, he could not remember what, had defied him and it was of paramount necessity that this something should be done away with, destroyed, ground into the earth. To rend and crush had become obligatory, the vindication of his claim to live. The poor body of the seal was gone and in its place was an enemy who had been given into his hands. He caught up the carcass, seeing not it, but all he hated, all he was burning to destroy and the dismemberment degenerated from honest butchery into an orgy. Dick Bennett stood aghast. In the master’s eye was a wildness which made the hind thankful he was even more inconspicuous than small. For once his querulousness was hushed. "The old devil pulled and dragged and ’acked as though ’e was mad," was his description afterwards of the scene. "’E fetched ’is spite out on the poor creature. It made me fairly sick to see ’im."