Let us get into the woods where we can enjoy ourselves. You
have never witnessed what I have lately, and I trust in God you never
will. I have seen within this month two hundred dead bodies on a beach
in every possible shape of disfiguration and decomposition--mangled,
mutilated, and dismembered corpses; male and female, old and young,
the prey of fishes, birds, beasts, and, what is worse, of human
beings. The wrecker had been there--whether he was of your country or
mine I know not, but I fervently hope he belonged to neither. Oh, I
have never slept sound since. The screams of the birds terrify me, and
yet what do they do but follow the instincts of their nature? They
batten on the dead, and if they do feed on the living, God has given
them animated beings for their sustenance, as, he has the fowls of the
air, the fishes of the sea, and the beasts of the field to us, but
they feed not on each other. Man, man alone is a cannibal. What an
awful word that is!"
"Exactly," sais I, "for he is then below the canine species--'dog
won't eat dog.'1 The wrecker lives not on those who die, but on those
whom he slays. The pirate has courage at least to boast of, he risks
his life to rob the ship, but the other attacks the helpless and
unarmed, and spares neither age nor sex in his thirst for plunder. I
don't mean to say we are worse on this side of the Atlantic than the
other, God forbid.
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