“Delightful!” cried Miss Fountain; “the waves bounded beneath you like a steed that knows its rider.  Pray continue.”

“Yes, Miss Fountain.  Now of course you can see that, if the line ran out too easy, the whale would leave us astern altogether, and if it jammed or ran too hard, she would tow us under water.”

“Of course we see,” said Eve, ironically; “we understand everything by instinct.  Hang explanations when I’m excited; go ahead, do!”

“Then I won’t explain how it is or why it is, but I’ll just let you know that two or three hundred fathom of line are passed round the boat from stem to stern and back, and carried in and out between the oarsmen as they sit.  Well, it was all new to me then; but when the boat began jumping and rocking, and the line began whizzing in and out, and screaming and smoking like—­there now, fancy a machine, a complicated one, made of poisonous serpents, the steam on, and you sitting in the middle of the works, with not an inch to spare, on the crankest, rockingest, jumpingest, bumpingest, rollingest cradle that ever—­”

“David!” said Eve, solemnly.

“Hallo!” sang out David.

“Don’t!”

“Oh, yes, do!” cried Lucy, slightly clasping her hands.

“If this little black ugly line was to catch you, it would spin you out of the boat like a shuttlecock; if it held you, it would cut you in two, or hang you to death, or drown you all at one time; and if it got jammed against anything alive or dead that could stand the strain, it would take the boat and crew down to the coral before you could wink twice.”

“Oh, dear!” said Lucy; “then I don’t think I like it now; it is too terrible.  Pray go on, Mr.—­Mr.—­”

“Well, Miss Fountain, when a novice like me saw this black serpent twisting and twirling, and smoking and hissing in and out among us, I remembered the skipper’s words, and I hailed Jack—­it was he had laid the line—­he was in the bow.

“‘Jack,’ said I.

“’Hallo!” said he.

“‘For God’s sake, are there any hitches in the line?’ said I.

“‘Not as I knows on,’ says he, much cooler than you sit there; and that is a sailor all over.  Well, she towed us about a mile, and then she was blown, and we hauled up on the line, and came up with her, and drove lances into her, till she spouted blood instead of salt water, and went into her flurry, and rolled suddenly over our way dead, and was within a foot of smashing us to atoms; but if she had it would only have been an accident, for she was past malice, poor thing.  Then we took possession, planted our flagstaff in her spouting-hole, you know, and pulled back to the ship, and she came down and anchored to the whale, and then, for the first time, I saw the blubber stripped off a whale and hoisted by tackles into the ship’s hold, which is as curious as any part of the business, but a dirtyish job, and not fit for the present company, and I dare say that is enough about whales.”