I suppose that his motive, if he had one, was to give his dog a few minutes' amusement in retrieving the shattered little bird from the water and in playing with and carrying it. But if I had gone to him and demanded to know why he had taken that happy little life, which was sacred to me, I think his answer, if he had condescended to make one, would have been very contemptuous—I think he would have said that he perceived me to be a sentimentalist and that he declined to say anything to a person of that sort.
There are not, I imagine, many men of so fine a temper of mind as to escape this hardening effect of the gun in the hand.
In conclusion of this chapter I will go back to the subject of the Cornish seals of that small surviving colony which has its ancestral home in the caves outside the Bay of St. Ives. Sportsmen occasionally shoot them just for the pleasure of the thing, but the fishermen of St. Ives do not consider that they suffer any injury from the animals and have consequently refrained from persecuting them. Unhappily they are now threatened with extermination from a new quarter: the students at the Camborne Mining School have recently found out a new and pleasant pastime, which is to seat themselves with rifle or fowling-piece on the cliff and watch for the appearance of a brown head above the water below of a seal going out of or coming in to the caves and letting fly at it. When they hit the seal it sinks and is seen no more, but the animal is not wanted, the object is to shoot it, and this accomplished the sportsman goes back happy and proud at his success in having murdered so large and human-like a creature.
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CHAPTER XVII THE COMING OF SPRING
Spring in winter—John Cocking—Antics and love-flights of the shag—Herring gull mocked by a jackdaw—Migrating sea-birds—Departure of winter visitors—Appearance of the wheatear—Resident songsters—The frogs' carnival—A Dominican adder—Willow-wren and chiffchaff—Nesting birds and washing-day—A merciful woman—Pied wagtails in a quarry—Boys and robins.