son de debbil, en, after all, we get eighteen bar'l ob
dirty oil out ob him. Wa'nt worf de clean sparm scrap we use ter bile
him. G' 'way!" Which emphatic adjuration, addressed not to me, but to
the unconscious monster below, closed the lesson for the time.

The calm still persisted, and, as usual, fish began to abound,
especially flying-fish. At times, disturbed by some hungry bonito or
dolphin, a shoal of them would rise--a great wave of silver--and skim
through the air, rising and falling for perhaps a couple of hundred
yards before they again took to the water; or a solitary one of larger
size than usual would suddenly soar into the air, a heavy splash behind
him showing by how few inches he had missed the jaws of his pursuer.
Away he would go in a long, long curve, and, meeting the ship in his
flight, would rise in the air, turn off at right angles to his former
direction, and spin away again, the whir of his wing-fins distinctly
visible as well as audible. At last he would incline to the water, but
just as he was about to enter it there would be an eddy--the enemy
was there waiting--and he would rise twenty, thirty feet, almost
perpendicularly, and dart away fully a hundred yards on a fresh course
before the drying of his wing membranes compelled him to drop. In the
face of such a sight as this, which is of everyday occurrence in these
latitudes, how trivial and misleading the statements made by the natural
history books seem.

They tell their readers that the EXOCETUS VOLITANS "does not fly; does
not flutter its wings; can only take a prolonged leap," and so on. The
misfortune attendant upon such books seems, to an unlearned sailor like
myself, to be that, although posing as authorities, most of the authors
are content to take their facts not simply at second-hand, but even unto
twenty-second-hand. So the old fables get repeated, and brought up to
date, and it is nobody's business to take the trouble to correct them.

The weather continued calm and clear, and as the flying-fish were about
in such immense numbers, I ventured to suggest to Goliath that we might
have a try for some of them. I verily believe he thought I was mad. He
stared at me for a minute, and then, with an indescribable intonation,
said, "How de ol' Satan yew fink yew gwain ter get'm, hey? Ef yew spects
ter fool dis chile wiv any dem lime-juice yarns, 'bout lanterns 'n boats
at night-time, yew's 'way off." I guessed he meant the fable current
a