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40

THE OLD CLOCK ON THE STAIRS.

the same night or the next morning in Stonington, and supplied from fifty to one hundred different tables, as we threw them up on the dock for any one to help himself. I am unable to perceive that I committed any sin in taking them, or any sin in the excitement and pleasure of taking them.

It is time moralists had done with this mistaken morality. If you eschew animal food entirely, then you may argue against killing animals, and I will not argue with you. But the logic of this business is simply this: The Creator made fish and flesh for the food of man, and as we can't eat them alive, or if we do, we can't digest them alive, the result is we must kill them first, and (see the old rule of cooking a dolphin) it is sometimes a further necessity, since they won't come to be killed when we call them, that we must first catch them. Show first, then, that it is a painful necessity, a necessity to be avoided if possible, which a good man must shrink from and abhor, unless starved into it, to take fish or birds, and which he must do when he does it with regret, and with sobriety and seriousness, as he would whip his

child, or shave himself when his beard is three days old, and you have your case. But till you show this, I will continue to think it great sport to supply my market with fish.

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