and of angels plead in vain. But something can be done with the
children, if one gets them young enough, or so one hopes. Sometimes I
reproach myself because when one of the people who practise these
abominations is in pain and grief, I look on and feel very little pity
when I remember all. 'It is not here the pain of the world is swelled,'
I say to myself; 'it is out on the rocks, in the fields, where the
little maimed things are creeping and wondering why, and the rabbits are
crying all night in the traps....' It could all be so easily avoided;
that's what makes it worse. Deliberately to augment the sum of suffering
in the world, where there must be so much--it's inconceivable."

"Like adding to the sum of ugliness. These people do that too," said
Killigrew, thinking of the hideous houses and chapels run up day by
day; "and it's all so beautiful and looks so happy if one only lets it
alone...."

"There's a queer vein of cruelty in the Celt--at least in the Cornish
Celt--that is worse than the Latin," went on Boase. "When they are
angered they wreak vengeance on anything. And sometimes when there are a
lot of them together under circumstances which you would think would
have roused their pity, the devil of wanton cruelty enters into them. I
shall never forget when a school of whales came ashore in the Bay ...
they lay there stranded, poor creatures! And from the oldest man to the
little boys out of school a blood-lust came on everyone. They tore and
hacked at the poor creatures with penknives and any weapon they could
get, they carved their names on them and stopped up their blow-holes
with stones, till the place was a perfect shambles and the blood soaked
into the sand as into an arena in ancient Rome.... Nobody could stop
them. It was a sight to make one weep for shame that one was a man."

Ishmael lay in silence. He knew--no one with eyes to see could live
there and not know--but, like Killigrew, he had always tried not to
think too much about it. He was so unable to take things superficially
that he feared thought, and hence often did less than men who did not
care as much. He gave a slight movement now that was not so much
impatience as a thrusting away of a thing that sickened him and which he
felt he could not stem. It seemed to him that the glory of the day had
departed. He, too, remembered that shambles of which the Parson spoke;
it had been the first time the pain in the world he so loved had come
home to h