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CHAPTER XXIX 
THOUGHTS IN A SENTRY-BOX 
HAT wren was an interlude, and the puffins 
another. When he of the bottle-nose returned, 
I at first used the shelter which I had constructed 
during his absence, but soon left it for another great 
precipice of a rock that also overhung the pool, and 
in which a huge fracture, half-way up, made a splendid 
natural concealment. Afterwards, however, I came 
to the conclusion that as long as one behaved with 
any sense of propriety, avoiding loud or startling 
noises, and not putting oneself shamelessly en évidence, 
these seals would never take alarm, for indeed they 
seemed to have lived all their lives in a happy un- 
familiarity with man, upon which terms I devoutly 
hope they may continue. 
Well, like the world, one does go forward, though 
slowly. Not so many years ago the sight of these 
seals would have made me want to shoot them. God 
alone knows why—or, rather, I know why, perfectly 
well : the inherited instinct of the savage, which 1s not 
in itself, as some humanitarians think, a bad thing, or 
at any rate in the savage it was not, only it is now 
out of place, and reason and morality together ought 
to insist upon crushing it. It is because the wish, or 
rather passion, to kill wild animals is so natural, that 
it seems so right to those who have it, for the strong 
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