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But no one ever knew what he was not sorry about, for the poor man was obliged to swallow down the rest of his sentence with half a pint of muddy water. The Major advanced quietly, making regular strokes, worthy of a master swimmer. The sailors took to the water like porpoises, while Robert clung to Thaouka's mane, and was carried along with him.
There are also Trouts, Porpoises, Rayes, Oldwiues, Mullets, Plaice, and very many other sorts of excellent good fish, which we haue taken and eaten, whose names I know not but in the countrey language: we haue the pictures of twelue sorts more, as they were drawen in the countrey, with their names.
Tom looked; but he could see nothing in the middle of the pool but one peaked iceberg, and he said so. "That's Mother Carey," said the whale, "as you will find when you get to her. There she sits making old beasts into new all the year round." "How does she do that?" "I suppose," said Tom, "she cuts up a great whale like you into a whole shoal of porpoises?"
I have come to believe in the personality of porpoises. They swam beside the ship, playing about in the water all the while, rolling over and diving, and chasing each other just as if they knew they had a "gallery." We did not reward them very well either, for the Prophet shot one, and we ate bits of him for lunch the porpoise, I mean, not the Prophet.
Great crabs walked around on their long, jointed legs, and Tom saw some lobsters that would have brought joy to the heart of a fisherman. "Look at the big fish!" cried Mr. Damon suddenly, and he pointed to some dark, shadowy forms that swam up to the glass windows, evidently puzzled by the light. "Porpoises," declared Captain Weston briefly, "a whole school of them."
The dark line had turned, but the school was still behind, churning the water in clumsy haste; they were coming in. Then the brit broke in silvery leaping waves on the shelving beach. The threefold hunt was over; the porpoises turned out to sea in search of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came slowly, stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish.
Since leaving "Gib." we have been under the escort of shoals of porpoises, who ever and anon shoot ahead to compare rate of speed; or, by way of change in the programme, to exhibit their fishy feats under the ship's bows.
In the shallow places mullet leaped wildly as the rays of the bull's-eye lantern fell on them, while porpoises sniffed and tarpon splashed in their light. Sculling was hard work for Ned, who had none of the easy and graceful swing with which Dick threw his weight on a sculling oar, a skill which he had acquired during his life on the sponger.
And then I saw one of those great white-hot silver bolts hurl itself from sea to air in a wide arch, and fall back again into the water with a mighty splash; and all the flying water seemed to burn as it fled. Truly it was but a school of mackerel, and the porpoises which fed on the silver fish, all made wonderful by the eerie fires of a summer sea; but I could not tell that all at once.
Dick looked as if he might be persuaded to forgive her, and for some minutes they stood in silence, leaning over the rail and looking at the playful porpoises beneath them, when he said: "I hope you don't think I didn't appreciate your father's lovely offer. You will never know how grateful I really was to him and to somebody else, too, who, I think, had something to do with it."
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