may
take to scare him, but I, Lord Dolphin, inhabitant of the great
Mediterranean Sea, was scared nearly out of my wits and skin by the
sight I saw one day.

But there is this to comfort me: if I was a coward at the sight, there
were plenty of other creatures in the sea to keep me company. Mercy on
us! Such a scuttling and rushing, such a whisking and a whacking, flying
and plunging, I for one never saw before. There was actually a chorus of
flapping fins and thumping tails as we raced for our lives.

Was it a steam-engine or a monster boiler that was coming right down
from upper regions into our midst? Or, had some new sea-monster fallen
from the skies to drive us from our hunting and fishing grounds?

We knew something about sea-lions, the huge creature that you may have
seen at the Zoo, or in a tank at the park, lifting itself like an
enormous sea-horse, and roaring like the animal whose name it bears. But
a sea-lion would not have cut through the water from way above. It would
have come steering along like a great black vessel, puffing and blowing,
while all the time it would have been a creature of the sea, and we
should have known it, and not have been so terrified.

Or, had a whale come bearing down from upper waters, as they sometimes
do, there would have been a disturbance first, made by the spouting and
slashing that our instinct at once would have told us came from some
monster of the deep.

Or, again, had it been the hulk of a vessel that could not stand some
violent storm, oh, yes, we should have known what that was, too. But
now, off tore the fishes, mad with terror, big fishes, little fishes,
fat fellows, lean fellows, pleasant ones, and grumblers.

I laughed, yes, with all my fright I had to laugh at such a funny sight.
I was behind what Folks call "whole schools of fishes," only they speak
of "a school of fish," meaning many of one kind, but the madcap crowd I
looked upon was made up of almost every size and sort.

[Illustration: "OFF TORE THE FISHES, MAD WITH TERROR"]

I saw a porpoise--porpus--my enormous cousin, all of fifteen feet
long, crowd in midst a multitude of swift little swimmers, as if he
meant to make them help in spinning him through the water faster than he
could go by himself. Then on the back of another Dolphin, I saw a crowd
of little fishes that seemed so stiff with fear, they had been knowing
enough to cling to the back of the great fish, making a boat of him to
bear them