se. Like a lioness, when the
cook-boy had struck him with a stick to drive him out of the kitchen, had
Biddy sprung upon the black, receiving without wince or whimper one
straight blow from the stick, and then downing him and mauling him among
his pots and pans until dragged (for the first time snarling) away by the
unchiding _Mister_ Haggin, who; however, administered sharp words to the
cook-boy for daring to lift hand against a four-legged dog belonging to a
god.

Jerry knew why his mother did not plunge into the water after him. The
salt sea, as well as the lagoons that led out of the salt sea, were
taboo. "Taboo," as word or sound, had no place in Jerry's vocabulary.
But its definition, or significance, was there in the quickest part of
his consciousness. He possessed a dim, vague, imperative knowingness
that it was not merely not good, but supremely disastrous, leading to the
mistily glimpsed sense of utter endingness for a dog, for any dog, to go
into the water where slipped and slid and noiselessly paddled, sometimes
on top, sometimes emerging from the depths, great scaly monsters, huge-
jawed and horribly-toothed, that snapped down and engulfed a dog in an
instant just as the fowls of _Mister_ Haggin snapped and engulfed grains
of corn.

Often he had heard his father and mother, on the safety of the sand, bark
and rage their hatred of those terrible sea-dwellers, when, close to the
beach, they appeared on the surface like logs awash. "Crocodile" was no
word in Jerry's vocabulary. It was an image, an image of a log awash
that was different from any log in that it was alive. Jerry, who heard,
registered, and recognized many words that were as truly tools of thought
to him as they were to humans, but who, by inarticulateness of birth and
breed, could not utter these many words, nevertheless in his mental
processes, used images just as articulate men use words in their own
mental processes. And after all, articulate men, in the act of thinking,
willy nilly use images that correspond to words and that amplify words.

Perhaps, in Jerry's brain, the rising into the foreground of
consciousness of an image of a log awash connoted more intimate and
fuller comprehension of the thing being thought about, than did the word
"crocodile," and its accompanying image, in the foreground of a human's
consciousness. For Jerry really did know more about crocodiles than the
average human. He could smell a crocodile farther