There, the duty stopped.
There, too, life stopped. Nature has educated herself to a
singular sympathy for death. On the antarctic glacier, nearly
five thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses
of seals, where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in
peace. "Unless we had actually found these remains, it would have
been past believing that a dying seal could have transported
itself over fifty miles of rough, steep, glacier-surface," but
"the seal seems often to crawl to the shore or the ice to die,
probably from its instinctive dread of its marine enemies." In
India, Purun Dass, at the end of statesmanship, sought solitude,
and died in sanctity among the deer and monkeys, rather than
remain with man. Even in America, the Indian Summer of life
should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and
infinite in wealth and depth of tone -- but never hustled. For
that reason, one's own passive obscurity seemed sometimes nearer
nature than John Hay's exposure. To the normal animal the
instinct of sport is innate, and historians themselves were not
exempt from the passion of baiting their bears; but in its turn
even the seal dislikes to be worried to death in age by creatures
that have not the strength or the teeth to kill him outright.
On reaching Washington, November 14, 1904, Adams saw at a
glance that Hay must have rest.
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