“If you had watched as long as I have ... seen all the mutilated birds with trailing legs and broken wings that pick up a miserable living as long as the warm weather lasts....  There’s not a boy in the countryside, save a few in whom I’ve managed to instil the fear of the Lord, that doesn’t think he’s a perfect right to throw stones at them, and, worse, to catch them on devilish little hooks and as likely as not throw them aside to die when caught.  Grown men do it—­it’s quite a trade.  I know one who, if he catches on his hooks a bird he does not want, wrenches its beak open and, tearing the hook out, flings the bird away to die.  This just mutilates the bird sufficiently to prevent it getting caught and giving him all the trouble over again.  And the Almighty does not strike this man with his lightning from heaven....  I sometimes marvel at the patience of God, and in my short-sighted ignorance even deplore it....”

“Don’t tell me,” said Killigrew swiftly.  “I don’t want to know.  I’d rather think they were all safe and happy.  It isn’t as though one could do anything.”

“One can do very little.  Lack of imagination, which is doubtless the sin against the Holy Ghost, is at the root of it, and to that the tongues of men 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.”