here was greatly marred by extensive cotton mills that
had been built along the river, just below where the whaling piers used
to be. The swordfish schooners were at the pier, however, large as life,
and Colin felt quite a thrill of excitement as he stepped aboard the
little vessel on which he was to live for the next couple of days, and
saw the narrow dark bunks in the entirely airless cabin in which four
men were to sleep. Dr. Jimson and Colin practically were going as
members of the crew, the two men, whose places they were taking, staying
home from the trip.

Long before sunrise the following morning they were up, and by daybreak
the schooner was standing out of the harbor for Block Island, one of the
famous haunts of the swordfish. Colin, who had good eyesight, and who
was always eager to be up and doing, volunteered to go to the
crow's-nest and keep a lookout for the dorsal fin of a swordfish, which,
he was told, could be seen a couple of miles away. There was no
advantage in going aloft, however, until toward noon, when, the water
being still, the swordfish come up to sun themselves.

Once Colin was quite sure that he saw a swordfish, but just as he was
about to shout, there flashed across his mind a sentence that he had
read somewhere of the likelihood of confusing a shark's fin with that of
a swordfish, and soon he was able to make out that it was a shark. As it
grew toward noon and the sun's rays beat directly on him, Colin began to
realize that sitting on a scantling two inches by four at the top of a
schooner's mast in a bobbing sea, under a broiling sun, was a long way
from being a soft snap, but he would have scorned to make a complaint.
He was more than glad, though, when the cook hailed all hands to dinner,
and one of the sailors went to the crow's-nest.

At dinner Colin turned the conversation to swordfish and their ways.

"There's one thing I don't quite understand, Dr. Jimson," he asked, "is
a spear-fish the same as a swordfish, only that the weapon is shorter?"

"Not at all," was the reply, "the spear-fish is a variety of the great
sailfish, which you see in West Indian waters six or seven feet long,
with a huge dorsal fin, blue with black spots, looming above the water
like the sail of a strange craft. But the real difference is in the
spear or sword. In the case of the spear-fish it is bony, being a
prolongation of the skull; in the case of the swordfish it is horny, and
horns, as you probably