IN THE SHETLANDS 309 
or “never ” in animal life. As Darwin has most truly 
said, every creature is ready to alter its habits, as the 
opportunity arises, and the greater number of them 
are, in some way or another, always in process of 
doing so. 
Was the puffin dead when the gull flew up with it? 
If it was, then had it found it so, or killed it itself? 
Did it drop it on purpose, to kill it, or let it fall by 
accident? These questions I am unable to answer ; 
but in regard to the two last, gulls are credited here 
with letting crabs fall on the rocks, in order to break 
their shells. Even if the puffin were dead before, 
such a fall, by bursting or bruising the body, might 
make it easier to tear open—an operation which the 
gull, I believe, had not yet had time to perform. 
The whole ground where this gull went up with its 
victim—for I have little doubt myself as to what had 
taken place—was honeycombed with puffin-burrows, 
and troops of puffins stood everywhere about. I sat 
down where I had halted, and before long two other 
herring-gulls came and stood in the same locality, 
close to several of these poor little birds, who, | 
thought, seemed embarrassed by their presence, but 
powerless to resent it, and perhaps not sufficiently 
intelligent to divine its true purport. 
The gulls, I thought, had a sort of unpleasant, evil- 
boding look ; a sullen, brazen, criminal appearance, 
like the two murderers in that scene with Clarence, 
just before the duke awakes—but this may have been 
partly due to imagination, after what I had just seen, 
