NEVER AGAIN $63 



wicked hatch out, but those of the weak are addled. You 

 must have a jolly good pile of stones to hatch eggs after a 

 blizzard like that in December 191 1, when the rookeries 

 were completely snow-covered : nests, eggs, parents and all. 



Once hatched the chicks grow quickly from pretty grey 

 atoms of down to black lumps of stomach topped bya small 

 and quite inadequate head. They are two or more weeks 

 old, and they leave their parents, or their parents leave 

 them, I do not know which. If socialism be the national- 

 ization of the means of production and distribution, then 

 they are socialists. They divide into parents and children. 

 The adult community comes up from the open sea, bring- 

 ing food inside them: they are full of half-digested shrimps. 

 But not for their own children : these, if not already dead, 

 are lost in a crowd of hungry tottering infants which be- 

 siege each food-provider as he arrives. But not all of them 

 can get food, though all of them are hungry. Some have 

 already been behindhand too long : they have not managed 

 to secure food for days, and they are weak and cold and 

 very weary. 



"As we stood there and watched this race for food we 

 were gradually possessed with the idea that the chicks 

 looked upon each adult coming up full-bellied from the 

 shore as not a parent only, but a food-supply. The parents 

 were labouring under a totally different idea, and intended 

 either to find their own infants and feed them, or else to 

 assimilate their already partially digested catch themselves. 

 The more robust of the young thus worried an adult until, 

 because of his importunity, he was fed. But with the less 

 robust a much more pathetic ending was the rule. A chick 

 that had fallen behind in this literal race for life, starving 

 and weak, and getting daily weaker because it could not 

 run fast enough to insist on being fed, again and again ran 

 off pursuing with the rest. Again and again it stumbled 

 and fell, persistently whining out its hunger in a shrill and 

 melancholy pipe, till at last the race was given up. Forced 

 thus by sheer exhaustion to stop and rest, it had no chance 

 of getting food. Each hurrying parent with its little fol- 

 lowing of hungry chicks, intent on one thing only, rushed 



