156 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



lay there dying. Its eyes and its moans showed its agony; it 

 seemed to plead with us for help. I managed to give it the 

 coup de grace with a bullet through its head, but that face is 

 before me now, though it passed near half a hundred years ago. 

 Since that sad experience I have never killed a beast. Some of 

 my friends esteem this fanciful softness; it does not seem to me 

 so, for if it were fit, I would slay a man and not be troubled 

 about it further than by the regret that the conditions required 

 the action. It is the sudden and brutal assault of the hunter on 

 the unoffending creature which breeds this pain. 



Although there were not in all a dozen people on the island, 

 they all curiously stand out in the shadowy field of memory; 

 perhaps because they were so few, and needed the little society 

 we could give them. The families were too far apart about 

 sixty miles for them to see each other, and so they lived quite 

 alone. Their situation was worse than usual, for the reason that 

 the supply ship had been wrecked the year before and they had 

 been near two years without a chance to replenish their stores. 

 They had enough of pork, beans, and flour, and of oil for their 

 lamps, but all else they lacked. At the eastern light the wife of 

 the keeper was low with consumption, in that fearful business 

 with only her husband and a man helper. We proposed to take 

 her to the mainland, but there were no friends or kindred for 

 her to go to. We gave what we had of delicacies, especially white 

 sugar, which she curiously longed for, and also of the novels 

 and other light reading we had brought with us. She was a read- 

 ing woman of much quality, was greatly delighted with our little 

 gifts and contented with the expectation that she would die 

 the next winter. At the west-end light, the keeper had recently 

 lost his wife, whose grave was near the door. He bore his loss 

 with that grim simplicity which characterizes the seafarers who 

 live in the expectation of bad weather. He seemed to find some 

 comfort in firing his warning gun into the prevailing fog-bank 

 to tell ships that death lay that way. I admired the vigorous 

 way in which he would ram the charge and fire into the shadowy 



