An urchin-fish would make you laugh.  Some call it a sea-hedgehog.  It looks as if covered all over with great thorns, and a baby sea-urchin looks as if it was all ready to burst, it is so thick and round.

A sunfish was an odd piece.  It had round eyes, and the queer little fins just back of its neck looked like shoulder-capes.  It was so fat it had to swim with a waddle.

The herring I so much like for food are to be found in nearly all waters, and abundant, sweet, and inviting.  Famous ramblers they are, going in great parties of thousands in number, through wide tracts of ocean and sea.  I have found that a great deal of “money,” whatever that may be, is made by Folks out of the herring fisheries, along the Atlantic seacoast.

And let me whisper:  Do you like sardines?  Well, some Folks say that herring do not live in the Mediterranean Sea, that ancient Folks knew nothing about them, but that what we know as herring are really sardines.  These are caught in great numbers, pickled in some way, then soaked in oil, are put in little tin boxes, tightly sealed, and sent all over the world.

But let me whisper again, and this makes Lord Dolphin smile; it may make you laugh.  But honestly, they say that immense numbers of little herring, or alewives, a little fish very much like a herring, are caught on western shores of the Atlantic, pickled, packed in oil, and sold for sardines.

Isn’t it all very funny?  If I eat sardines and call them herring, and folks eat herring and call them sardines, why are we not square?  But as I want to be very honest in all I say, it may be that in speaking of the herring I so much prefer, I ought to say they are found oftenest at the far western part of the Mediterranean, where the ancient Folk were not so likely to explore.

After I had sailed for days, gliding like a streak through the deep, untroubled water, I came again to the Strait of Gibraltar.

Oh, with what a thrill of delight I saw this time, in these far happier days than when last I passed through it, this narrow outlet from ocean to sea.  I went through first in a tank, I returned with the broad ocean for my glorious bed.

I know now that the strait was named for the enormous Rock of Gibraltar, and that it once was called the Strait of Hercules.

Now “Hercules” is another “myth” you will study about in those old Greek fables called “mythology.”  He was one of the gods, and famed for his tremendous strength.  The story goes, that, coming up to a monstrous rock in the Atlantic Ocean that entirely separated it from the Mediterranean Sea, Hercules, wishing to pass through from ocean to sea, rent the great rock into two parts, so making a passage through.  And this was how the narrow outlet came to be called the Strait of Hercules.

Now, for many years the passage has been called the Strait of Gibraltar.  But the two great rocks at the entrance of the strait are called “The Pillars of Hercules.”