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Updated: July 18, 2025
A general and thorough investigation was instituted, and there, in a dark corner, under a hair mattress, and flat as a pancake, lay the poor puffin, alive! but not with the life wherewith it had lived before it was shot and emitting an odour that is indescribable, a description of which, therefore, would be quite unprofitable.
You were running away, and you know it. I guessed you would. I came to stop you, you, you quaking runaway. Your wound troubled you, hey? Didn't want another, hey?" There was an awful pause, broken by the entry from behind the Major of the outside porter, panting under the weight of a large portmanteau. "You had to take your portmanteau, too," observed Puffin witheringly, "in order to stop me.
It was the Major's turn to entertain his friend, and by half-past nine, on a certain squally October evening, he and Puffin were seated by the fire in the diary-room, while the rain volleyed at the windows and occasional puffs of stinging smoke were driven down the chimney by the gale that squealed and buffeted round the house.
When the young one is hatched the parent birds feed it on tiny fish and minnows. You can see here the puffin bringing up a minnow in his beak for supper. Beyond are great grey and white gulls, with their keen beaks and strong legs. They are pirates, the gulls, and will eat other birds' eggs if they can get them; they are wild and fierce.
The Navy had been in better form to-day, and after a decisive victory over the Army in the morning and an indemnity of half-a-crown, its match in the afternoon, with just the last hole to play, was all square. So Captain Puffin, having the honour, hit a low, nervous drive that tapped loudly at the timbered wall of the bunker, and cuddled down below it, well protected from any future assault.
"I am extremely sorry for what I said to you the other night," he said. "I am glad you are sorry," said Miss Mapp. "I offer you my apologies for what I said," continued Puffin. The whip whistled. "When you spoke to me on the occasion to which you refer," said Miss Mapp, "I saw of course at once that you were not in a condition to speak to anybody.
But all this toasting and buttering and grilling and frying your friends, and serving them up hot for all the old cats at a tea-table to mew over Pah!" Puffin was silent a moment in appreciation of these noble sentiments. "But you put in a lot of work over them," he said at length. "Often when I'm going up to bed, I see the light still burning in your sitting-room window."
Captain Puffin, at the other table, seemed to be behaving with the same impropriety, for the sound of his shrill, falsetto laugh was as regular as his visits to the bucket of red-currant fool. What if there was champagne in it after all, so Miss Mapp luridly conjectured! What if this unseemly good-humour was due to incipient intoxication? She took a little more of that delicious decoction herself.
She had gone out in obedience to an innocent and, indeed, laudable desire to ascertain how Major Benjy spent those evenings on which he had deceived her into imagining that, owing to her influence, he had gone ever so early to bed, only to find that he sat up ever so late and that she was fettered by a promise not to breathe to a soul a single word about the depravity of Captain Puffin, on pain of being herself accused out of the mouth of two witnesses of being equally depraved herself.
Professor Ansted does not include the Little Gull in his list, and there is no specimen in the Museum. GREAT SHEARWATER. Puffinus major, Faber. French, "Puffin majeur."
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