THE SEAL FISHING. 39 



gaged in cod fishing that they neglected the oleagi- 

 nous treasures to be obtained from the seal, which the 

 ice-fields yearly brought within their reach; so the 

 great herds were left to bring forth their young amid 

 the icy solitudes, undisturbed by the murderous gun, 

 club and knife of the seal hunters. To-day, however, 

 things are different, and the nurseries of countless 

 mother seals are transformed into slaughter-fields, red 

 with the blood of their murdered darlings, slain in 

 their icy cradles. The young seals are born on the 

 ice which the Arctic Current carries past the shores 

 from the fifteenth to the twentieth of February, and 

 until they are two weeks old they are as white as 

 snow and called " harps." When ten days old they 

 begin to change color and become in a short time of a 

 dark brown ; and as they grow very rapidly and yield 

 a much finer quality of oil than the old ones, the ob- 

 ject of the hunter is to reach them in their babyhood, 

 while yet fed by their mother's milk, and when they 

 are powerless to escape. So rapid is their growth 

 that by the sixteenth of March they are in the best 

 condition to be taken. By the first of April they be- 

 gin to leave the ice and take to the water, and can be 

 no longer so easily captured. When a vessel reaches 

 an ice-field, where the seals are visible, the men 

 eagerly bound upon the ice, and the work of destruc- 



