“Down here the minute life of the ocean waters swarmed more densely than at the surface.  Swimming slowly, the mother whale filled her mouth again and again with the tiny darting squid, till she had strained out and swallowed perhaps a ton of the pulpy provender.  As they felt the whalebone strainers closing about them, each one took alarm and let fly a jet of inky fluid, as if thinking to hide itself from Fate; and the dim green of the surrounding water grew clouded till the calf could hardly see, and had to crowd close to his mother’s side.  A twist or two of her mighty flukes, like the screw of an ocean liner, drove her clear of this obscurity, and carried her, a moment later, into a packed shoal of southward journeying capelin.”

The Babe’s mouth opened for the natural question:  “What’s capelin?”

But Uncle Andy got ahead of him.

“That’s a little fish something like a sardine,” he explained hastily.  “And they travel in such countless numbers that sometimes a storm will throw them ashore in long windrows like you see in a hay field, so that the farmers come and cart them away for manure.  Well, it did not take long for the old whale to fill up even her great stomach, when the capelin were so numerous.  She went ploughing through the shoal lazily, and stopped at last to rub her little one softly with her flipper.

“All at once she caught sight of a curious-looking creature swimming just beneath the shoal of capelin, and every now and then opening its mouth to gulp down a bushel or so of them.  It was about fifteen feet long, of a ghastly grayish white color, and from its snout stood straight out a sharp, twisted horn perhaps six feet in length.  It was only a stupid narwhal, with no desire in the world to offend his gigantic neighbor:  but she was nervous at the sight of his horn, which made her think of her dreaded enemy the swordfish.  Tucking her baby well under her fin, she made an hysterical rush at the unoffending stranger.  His little pig-like eyes blinked anxiously, and, darting off at his best pace, he was speedily lost to view in the cloudy myriads of the capelin.

“Having now been under water for some twelve or fifteen minutes, the mother whale knew that it was time for her baby to breathe again—­though she herself could have held on without fresh air for another five or even ten minutes without much trouble.”

The Babe gasped.  It was like a bad dream to him, the idea of going along without a breath.

“Oh, how it must hurt!” he burst forth.  “I should think it would kill them.”

“It would kill you, of course, in about two minutes,” replied Uncle Andy.  “But they are built differently.  They have a handy way of doing up a lot of breathing all at once, and then not having to think any more about it for a while.  You can readily see what a convenience that might be to them.