“But they live in the water, don’t they?” protested the Babe in surprise.

“Of course!” agreed Uncle Andy, wrapping his big trout up in wet grass and seating himself on a handy log for a smoke.

“Then why aren’t they fish?” persisted the Babe, ever anxious to get to the root of a matter.

“Because they’re not,” replied Uncle Andy, impatient at having let himself in for explanations, which he always disliked.  “They’re animals, just as much as a dog or a muskrat.”

The Babe wrinkled his forehead in perplexity.  And Uncle Andy relented.

“You see,” he continued, “they’re not fish, because they cannot breathe under water like fish can, but have to come to the surface for air, just as we would have to.  And they’re not fish, because they nurse their babies as a cow or a cat does.  And—­and there are lots of other reasons.”

“What are the other reasons?” demanded the Babe eagerly.

But Uncle Andy had felt himself getting into deep water.  He adroitly evaded the question.

“Do you suppose this old trout here,” said he, pointing to the grassy bundle, “used to love and take care of its little ones, like the whale I’m going to tell you about loved and took care of hers?  No indeed!  The trout had hundreds of thousands, and liked nothing better than to eat them whenever it got the chance.  But the whale had only one—­at a time, that is—­and she always used to think there was nothing else like it in the world.  There are lots of other mothers as foolish as that.  Yours, for instance, now.”

The Babe laughed.  It pleased him when he understood one of Uncle Andy’s jokes—­which was not always, by any means.  He squatted himself on the moss before the log, where he could stare straight up into Uncle Andy’s face with his blue, steady, expectant eyes.

“It was a long way off from Silverwater,” began Uncle Andy in a far-away voice, and with a far-away look in his eyes, “that the whale calf was born.  It was up North, where the summer sun swung low over a world of cold green seas, low grey shores, crumbling white ice-fields, and floating mountains of ice that flashed with lovely, fairy-like tints of palest blue and amethyst.  The calf himself, with his slippery greyish-black back and under-parts of a dirty cream color, was not beautiful—­though, of course, his mother thought him so, as he lay nursing just under her great fin, rocked gently by the long, slow Arctic swells.”

“What’s Arctic swells?” interrupted the Babe, wrinkling his forehead more than ever.  He had a vision of tall, smart-looking Eskimos, in wonderful furs; and it seemed to him very curious that the old mother whale should be so tame as to let them come close enough to rock her baby for her.