somerset, rushed forward, swallowed the pork, and would have snapped the rope in two, as easily as a man bites off the bottom of a radish, had it not been for the three or four feet of chain attached to the hook. A shark's under-jaw opens like a snuff-box with the lid downward, his upperjaw being fixed and immoveable, and his monstrous mouth, wide enough sometimes to swallow a man whole, is furnished with six rows of sharp teeth, one hundred and forty-four in all, of a triangular shape.

No sooner did the shark show a part of his white belly, as he turned nearly on his back to take the bait, than the old sailor holding the line, who seemed to be quite at home at the sport, prepared to give the cord a smart pull, to fix the barb of the hook fast in the fish. This he did when

42

THE OLD SAILOR HOOKS THE SHARK.

the bait was fairly swallowed, and away darted the shark like an arrow through the waves in the wake of the ship, taking out the rope with such rapidity, that, when he canie to the end of it, the sudden jerk fairly pulled him over on the surface of the water.

The glaring eyes of the furious monster looked terrible as he was played with for a time, pulling him up with his nose to the surface, and then giving him a little more rope again. He flung himself about mad with rage, but it was to no purpose; the sailors cracked their jokes, 10ared with laughter at the desperate struggles of the enraged animal, and bawled out to him to hold fast, or they should never get him aboard and I thought it impossible too, for he weighed between two and three thousand pounds.

When the shark was close up to the after-part of the ship, a running bowline knot was slipped down the rope over his head, and halfway along his body; he was then hoisted up, drawn over the taffrail, and flung right on the deck. Frank was in the thick of "the fun," he had seen and heard of the destruction of human beings by sharks, and joined the crew as they despatched the floundering monster with their knives and boarding-pikes ; care being taken first to sever the tail from the body with a broad axe.

STORMY PETRELS.

43

It seemed to me to be a barbarous amusement; but the sailors took great delight in it, and I must own that I would not willingly have been absent on the occasion.

Porpoises and stormy petrels, called Mother Carey's chickens, were both objects of curiosity till they grew familiar to me; the different vessels also which passed, some at a distance, and some near enough to be spoken to with the trumpet, varied the scene.

Just before a storm, the stormy petrels alighted under our stern, or flew in the wake of the ship to protect themselves from the threatened tempest, which they seem to know is about to commence.

Sailors are very superstitions. They believe that the flight of petrels is the harbinger of storms and shipwrecks, and that these Mother Carey's chickens hatch their eggs under their wings as they sit on the water, and feed and rear them on the ocean amid waves and tempests. These pretty little web-footed birds swim unobserved on the surface of the sea in calm weather, it is true, and are on the wing near the vessel when storins arise; but, such is the rapidity of their flight, that they may be

DOLPHINS AND PORPOISES.

45

several hundred miles distant at sea in the middle of the day, and yet be at home feeding their young on the island rocks where they build their nests before evening. A railroad car runs twenty miles an hour, but these swift-winged birds go through the air probably at the rate of more than one hundred miles in the same space of time, and are at home in the night, and away in the morning.

Dolphins and porpoises always seem to be playing, gambolling, and jumping out of the water for their amusement; but in reality they are in pursuit of prey, especially of flying fish. Dolphins are sometimes twenty or twentyfive feet in length, porpoises about half that length; they follow mackerel and other small fish into bays, mouths of rivers, and harbours, sailing in troops one after another, with great quickness, like boys at leap-frog, diving headforemost downwards, making a kind of circular leap, and then rising at some distance. They are without gills, but respire or spout vapour through a semicircular pipe in the upper part of the head, which adds to the turmoil and bluster they make on the sea.

.

As they live near the surface of the water, it is said they dread storms, as much as an old sailor does. Seamen say, that when troops of them are seen moving in a particular course, a storm is brewing in an opposite direction.