CHAPTER XXXIV 
ALL ABOUT SEALS 
OX coming to the cliffs, to-day, I saw, lying on the 
rock in the little pool where I have watched 
the sea-leopard, as I call it, and that other which I 
have hitherto called the bottle-nosed seal, or Bottle- 
nose—because that seems to be a local name for it, 
and its nose, I thought, bore it out—a mighty creature, 
the same, I at once saw, as had lain there on the 
seaweed, that first morning. It presented, as before, 
an extraordinary appearance, seeming to be parti- 
coloured, light above and dark below. The tide was 
coming in, and, wishing to see it go off with the wash, 
I descended rapidly—indeed, a little too rapidly. My 
knee, which is sometimes, in a rheumatic sort of way, 
painful to bend, has lately become very much so in 
descending the cliffs. To ease it, therefore, I sat, 
and began to slide down the steep, green incline, and, 
in doing this, my foot missed, or slid over, the little 
depression that I had destined for it, which produced 
such an acceleration of speed that, with several great 
bumps and a change of position from the perpendicular 
to the horizontal, I had nearly still further abridged 
the distance, and eased, perhaps, more than my knee. 
However, I managed to stop myself some way before 
a sheer edge, which, though not much in the way of 
height, would, no doubt, have been as good as 
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