“Rollers, I mean; Big waves!” grunted Uncle Andy discontentedly.  “A fellow has to be so extraordinarily literal with you to-day!  Now, if you interrupt again, I’ll stop, and you can get Bill to tell you all about it.  As I was going to say, he—­the calf, not Bill—­was about eight or nine feet long.  He looked all head.  And his head looked all mouth.  And his mouth—­but you could not see into that for it was very busy nursing.  His mother, however, lay with her mouth half open, a vast cavern of a mouth, nearly a third the length of her body—­and it looked all whalebone.  For, you must know, she was of the ancient and honorable family of the Right Whales, who scorn to grow any teeth, and therefore must live on soup so to speak.”

Here he paused, and looked at the Babe as much as to say, “Now, I suppose you’re going to interrupt again, in spite of all I’ve said.”  But the Babe, restraining his curiosity about the soup, only sat staring at him with solemn eyes.  So he went on.

“You see, it was a most convenient kind of soup, a live soup, that they fed upon.  The sea, in great spots and patches, is full of tiny creatures, sometimes jelly-fish, sometimes little squid of various kinds, all traveling in countless hosts from somewhere-or-other to somewhere else, they know not why.  As the great mother whale lay there with her mouth open, these swarming little swimmers would calmly swim into it, never dreaming that it was a mouth.  There they would get tangled among those long narrow strips or plates of whale-bone, with their fringed edges.  Every little while the whale would lazily close her mouth, thrust forward her enormous fat tongue, and force the water out through this whalebone sieve of hers.  It was like draining a dish of string beans through a colander.  Having swallowed the mess of jellyfish and squid, she would open her mouth again, and wait for another lot to come in.  It was a very easy and comfortable way to get a bite of breakfast, while waiting for her baby to finish nursing.  And every little while, from the big blowhole or nostril on top of her head she would ‘spout,’ or send up a spray-like jet of steamy breath.  And every little while, too, the big-headed baby under her flipper would send up a baby spout, as if in imitation of his mother.

“You must not think, however, that this lazy way of feeding was enough to keep the vast frame of the mother whale (she was quite sixty feet long:  three times as long as Bill’s shanty yonder) supplied with food.  This was just nibbling.  When she felt that her baby had nursed enough, she gave it a signal which it understood.  It fell a little back along her huge side.  Then, lifting her enormous tail straight in the air, she dived slowly downward into the pale, greenish glimmer of the deeper tide, the calf keeping his place cleverly behind her protecting flipper.