416 
HABITS OP THE SEAL. 
curve, completely shut us in to the north, and the 
tongue of the pack we had come through lay between 
us and the sea. The wind had left us. We were 
drifting listlessly in a glassy sea that reflected the 
green-stone terraces and strange pyramidal masses of 
its romantic shores. 
We amused ourselves killing seals. There must 
have heen hundreds of them of all varieties playing 
about us. Generally they were to he seen paddling 
about alone, but sometimes in groups, like a party of 
school-boys frolicking in the Schuylkill. One of their 
favorite sports was " treading water," rising breast- 
high, keeping up a boisterous, indefatigable splashing, 
and stretching out their necks, as if to pry into the 
condition of things aboard ship. We compared their 
behavior to that of the timorous but curious natives, 
when the Europeans first met them in the waters of 
America ; and in our intercourse with them, conformed 
accurately to the Spanish precedent. 
Occasionally only we obeyed our "manifest des- 
tiny" with reluctance. Some of the younger of these 
poor sea-dogs had overmuch of the honest expression 
of their land brethren : the truncation of the muzzle in 
others, with no external ear showing behind it, set 
their faces in almost perfect and human-like oval. 
When one of these would come up out of the water 
near us, and, raising his head and shoulders, that stoop- 
ed like those of a hooded Esquimaux, gaze steadily at 
us with his liquid eye, then diving, come up a little 
nearer and stare again ; so drawing nearer and nearer, 
diving and rising alternately, till he came within mus- 
ket range ; it sometimes went hard to salute him with 
a bullet. 
We shot, among others, a very large beast (P. bar- 
