ets with some other disaster. And as the leading
boat rises to the long ocean swell of the offing, the killers close in
round her on either side, just keeping clear of the sweep of the oars,
and 'breaching' and leaping and spouting with the anticipative zest of
the coming bloody fray.

'Easy, lads, easy!' says the old boat-header; 'they're coming right down
on us. Billy was right. They're humpbacks, sure enough!'

The panting oarsmen pull a slower stroke, and then, as they watch
the great, savage creatures which swim alongside, they laugh in the
mirthless manner peculiar to most young native-born Australians, for
suddenly, with a last sharp spurt of vapour, the killers dive and
disappear into the dark blue beneath; for they have heard the whales,
and, as is their custom, have gone ahead of the boat, rushing swiftly
on below full fifty fathoms deep. Fifteen minutes later they rise to the
surface in the midst of the humpbacks, and half a square acre of ocean
is turned into a white, swirling cauldron of foam and leaping spray. The
bull-dogs of the sea have seized the largest whale of the school, and
are holding him for the boat and for the deadly lance of his human foes.
The rest of the humpbacks raise high their mighty flukes and 'sound,'
a hundred--two hundred--fathoms down, and, speeding seaward, leave the
unfortunate bull to his dreadful fate.

(And, in truth, it is a dreadful fate, and the writer of this sketch can
never forget how one day, as he and a little girl of six watched, from
a grassy headland on the coast of New South Wales, the slaughter of a
monstrous whale by a drove of killers, that the child wept and shuddered
and hid her face against his shoulder.)

Ranging swiftly alongside of him, from his great head down to the
'small' of his back, the fierce killers seize his body in their savage
jaws and tear great strips of skin and blubber from off his writhing
sides in huge mouthfuls, and then jerking the masses aside, take another
and another bite. In vain he sweeps his flukes with fearful strokes from
side to side--the bulldogs of the sea come not within their range; in
vain he tries to 'sound'--there is a devil on each side of his jaws,
their cruel teeth fixed firmly into his huge lips; perhaps two or three
are underneath him tearing and riving at the great tough corrugations of
his grey-ribbed belly; whilst others, with a few swift vertical strokes
of their flukes, draw back for fifty feet or so, charge