lain there before, If so, I can only account for his inability to get on to it on this occasion by supposing that it was not a sufficiently high tide, though, at the last, the waves, when they washed up to their highest point, were quite on a level with the point of rock. It certainly seems curious that he could not manage it, even then; but such great longing and striving must, I think, have been for a pleasure known and tasted.
I have ascribed this seal's biting of the rock to irritation, as those other actions which so well became him, and which I have very inadequately described, certainly were due to this. But another explanation is possible here. I have several times seen seals, when on the rocks, take the long brown seaweed, growing upon them, into their mouths, in such a manner as to make me think it might have been to pull themselves along by, as one would use a rope fixed at one end. However, I could never be sure whether it was for this or any other practical purpose, or only sportively, that it was laid hold of. But now, if seaweed is ever really used by seals in this way—to pull themselves along the rocks, that is to say, or to hoist themselves up on to them, then a strong growth of it here would have been most useful to this much-striving one, so that it may have been with an idea of this sort, though not amounting to more than a regret—an "Oh if there were only!" sort of feeling—that he bit upon the rock. If so, he showed another human touch, for the nakedness of this particular rock, and especially of this point of it that he had been so often nearly up
