THE HARBOR SEAL 



as a dozen of these animals drawn up together 

 on the muddy edge of the marsh. 



Birds and animals are all too generally clas- 

 sified by their power of working for man or 

 of serving him as food or for clothing,— by 

 their value in dollars and cents. As I was 

 watching a flock of herring gulls circling with 

 exquisite grace, and alighting like feathers on 

 the Charles River Basin in Boston, I heard 

 a teamster ask another what they were and 

 whether they were good for anything. As his 

 friend characterized them as entirely worth- 

 less, the men paid no further attention to 

 them. They would have been utterly unable 

 to understand the sentiment expressed by 

 Thompson Seton, a sentiment that I am sure 

 well applies to the seal: '' I would preserve 

 it, and a hundred others, even as I would pre- 

 serve a beautiful picture, or view, for the 

 unsordid joy of feasting the eyes on a sentient 

 fellow creature, that is a little pinnacle on the 

 cathedral of evolution, and glorious as an ex- 

 emplar of beauty in the wild way of life." 



187 



