or "never" in animal life. As Darwin has most truly said, every creature is ready to alter its habits, as the opportunity arises, and the greater number of them are, in some way or another, always in process of doing so.
Was the puffin dead when the gull flew up with it? If it was, then had it found it so, or killed it itself? Did it drop it on purpose, to kill it, or let it fall by accident? These questions I am unable to answer; but in regard to the two last, gulls are credited here with letting crabs fall on the rocks, in order to break their shells. Even if the puffin were dead before, such a fall, by bursting or bruising the body, might make it easier to tear open—an operation which the gull, I believe, had not yet had time to perform.
The whole ground where this gull went up with its victim—for I have little doubt myself as to what had taken place—was honeycombed with puffin-burrows, and troops of puffins stood everywhere about. I sat down where I had halted, and before long two other herring-gulls came and stood in the same locality, close to several of these poor little birds, who, I thought, seemed embarrassed by their presence, but powerless to resent it, and perhaps not sufficiently intelligent to divine its true purport.
The gulls, I thought, had a sort of unpleasant, evil-boding look; a sullen, brazen, criminal appearance, like the two murderers in that scene with Clarence, just before the duke awakes—but this may have been partly due to imagination, after what I had just seen,
