424 Notes on Sport and Travel v 



playing the fool after the usual fashion of bumptious 

 immaturity, I cannot say. Either view may be 

 reasonably taken, or any other you like to invent for 

 yourself 



This sort of threshing is, as I have said, commonly 

 supposed to be the work or play of that mysterious 

 monster the killer, or keeler whale, which the natural 

 history books call in Latin Orcus gladiator, as if he 

 were a professional backed for so much a fight. 

 One recent natural historian calls him ' the terror of 

 the ocean.' I suppose that I have never met this 

 species, never having seen the ocean particularly 

 terrified at anything, — the effect, so far as I am 

 concerned, having generally been very much the 

 other way. I have several times seen a big, wide- 

 flippered whalish-looking creature who had a peculiar 

 habit of sliding itself some two-thirds of its length out 

 of the water, and then falling back with a tremendous 

 splash, but to all appearance without an enemy near 

 him, either above or below, leaping at its own sweet 

 will, as free, or freer possibly, from any animosity 

 against any created being as a fresh river salmon 

 rejoicing in the prospect of his coming loves. I am 

 always told that this too is a keeler (always keeler, 

 never killer) thresher, but it has ever been utterly 

 unlike the animal depicted in the natural history 

 books, — a creature whose stomach is far too round 

 and portly, and whose flippers are far too short and 

 feeble, to give him more threshing-power than the 

 late Miss Biffin run to fat. 



