By and by I got up and strolled away to the dunes on the sea-front, and when I had gone about seventy or eighty yards a shot rang out behind me. Glancing back I saw that the sportsman had also got up and was now walking to a point among the dunes where he had planned to lie in wait for the geese. The retriever was some distance behind, playing with something; and then, instead of following his master, he came on to me, and seeing that he was carrying something I stooped down and drew it from his mouth. It was the titling--the little meadow-pipit; its anxious little question and challenge had been answered with an idle charge of shot when it flew up and hovered before the man with a gun.
I suppose that his motive, if he had one, was to give his dog a few minutes' amusement in retrieving the shattered little bird from the water and in playing with and carrying it. But if I had gone to him and demanded to know why he had taken that happy little life, which was sacred to me, I think his answer, if he had condescended to make one, would have been very contemptuous--I think he would have said that he perceived me to be a sentimentalist and that he declined to say anything to a person of that sort.
There are not, I imagine, many men of so fine a temper of mind as to escape this hardening effect of the gun in the hand.
In conclusion of this chapter I will go back to the subject of the Cornish seals of that small surviving colony which has its ancestral home in the caves outside the Bay of St. Ives. Sportsmen occasionally shoot them just for the pleasure of the thing, but the fishermen of St. Ives do not consider that they suffer any injury from the animals and have consequently refrained from persecuting them. Unhappily they are now threatened with extermination from a new quarter: the students at the Camborne Mining School have recently found out a new and pleasant pastime, which is to seat themselves with rifle or fowling-piece on the cliff and watch for the appearance of a brown head above the water below of a seal going out of or coming in to the caves and letting fly at it. When they hit the seal it sinks and is seen no more, but the animal is not wanted, the object is to shoot it, and this accomplished the sportsman goes back happy and proud at his success in having murdered so large and human-like a creature.