ting and their ungainly heads wagging. These
uneasy ones are always wriggling out or plunging in. Some crawl to the
tops of the rocks and lie like gunny bags stuffed with meal, or they
repose on the broken surfaces like masses of jelly. When they are all at
home the rocks have not room for them, and they crawl on and over each
other, and lie like piles of undressed pork. In the water they are black,
but when they are dry in the sun the skin becomes a dirty light brown.
Many of them are huge fellows, with a body as big as an ox. In the water
they are repulsively graceful; on the rocks they are as ungainly as
boneless cows, or hogs that have lost their shape in prosperity. Summer
and winter (and it is almost always summer on this coast) these beasts,
which are well fitted neither for land nor water, spend their time in
absolute indolence, except when they are compelled to cruise around in
the deep water for food. They are of no use to anybody, either for their
skin or their flesh. Nothing could be more thoroughly disgusting and
uncanny than they are, and yet nothing more fascinating. One can watch
them--the irresponsible, formless lumps of intelligent flesh--for hours
without tiring. I scarcely know what the fascination is. A small seal
playing by himself near the shore, floating on and diving under the
breakers, is not so very disagreeable, especially if he comes so near
that you can see his pathetic eyes; but these brutes in this perpetual
summer resort are disgustingly attractive. Nearly everything about them,
including their voice, is repulsive. Perhaps it is the absolute idleness
of the community that makes it so interesting. To fish, to swim, to
snooze on the rocks, that is all, for ever and ever. No past, no future.
A society that lives for the laziest sort of pleasure. If they were rich,
what more could they have? Is not this the ideal of a watering-place
life?

The spectacle of this happy community ought to teach us humility and
charity in judgment. Perhaps the philosophy of its attractiveness lies
deeper than its 'dolce far niente' existence. We may never have
considered the attraction for us of the disagreeable, the positive
fascination of the uncommonly ugly. The repulsive fascination of the
loathly serpent or dragon for women can hardly be explained on
theological grounds. Some cranks have maintained that the theory of
gravitation alone does not explain the universe, that repulsion is as
necessary as attracti