252 THE LAND'S END 



wide over the still sea, while the great gull, sitting on 

 the surface, proceeded in a leisurely manner to de- 

 spatch and then devour his victim, tearing it to pieces 

 with his big powerful yellow beak. 



He told me of several other little tragedies of the 

 kind which he had witnessed with surprise, one of 

 a curlew which at the moment of flying past him was 

 suddenly chased by a sparrow-hawk and pressed so 

 hard that it dashed down to the beach, where it was 

 instantly grappled. The ferryman made all haste to 

 the spot, and the hawk flew off at his approach, 

 leaving the curlew dead and bleeding on the sands. 

 He picked it up and took it home to eat it himself. 

 But of all these cases the one of the great black- 

 backed gull impressed him the most on account of the 

 casual way in which it came about, just as if the gull 

 had been taken by a sudden impulse to drop upon 

 and slaughter the young guillemot. Such an incident 

 serves to show how perilous a world the wild creature 

 exists in and on how small a matter its safety often 

 depends, and it also gives the idea of an almost un- 

 canny intelligence in the birds that live by violence. 

 No doubt the gull was tempted to fall on that young 

 bird solely because of its keeping a little apart from 

 the other two, because it had no parent of its own to 

 protect it. 



The rocks to the north of St. Ives Bay are an ancient 

 haunt of the common seal, one of the few colonies of 

 this animal now left on the south coast of Britain. 

 The ferryman was one day fishing in his boat at this 

 point close to the mouth of that vast cavern in the 



