JACK KETCH IN THE FOEEST. 259 



flashing with rage, is heightened by the thick and pro- 

 minent brows being drawn spasmodically up and down, 

 with the hair erect, causing a horrible and fiendish scowL 

 Weapons are torn from their possessors' grasp, gun-barrels 

 bent and crushed in by the powerful hands and vice-like 

 teeth of the enraged brute. More horrid still, however, 

 is the sudden and unexpected fate which is often inflicted 

 by him. Two negroes will be walking through one of the 

 woodland paths, unsuspicious of evil, when in an instant 

 one misses his companion, or turns to see him drawn up 

 in the air with a convulsed choking cry ; and in a few 

 minutes dropped to the ground a strangled corpse. The 

 terrified survivor gazes up, and meets the grin and glare 

 of the fiendish giant, who, watching his opportunity, 

 had suddenly put down his immense hind-hand, caught 

 the wretch by the neck with resistless power, and dropped 

 him only when he ceased to struggla Surely a horrible 

 improvised gallows this ! * 



The pursuit of the whale, whether that species which 

 our hardy mariners seek amidst the ice-floes of the Polar 

 Seas, or the still huger kind which wallows in the bound- 

 less Pacific, is one full of peril, and its annals are crowded 

 with strange and terrible adventures. Swift and sudden 

 deaths ; the shattering of a boat into fragments, and the 

 immersion of the crew in the freezing sea ; the dragging 

 of a man into the depths, by a turn of the tangled line 

 round his leg or arm ; are but too common incidents in 

 this warfare with the leviathan. One instance of this last- 

 ♦ See Prot Owen on the Gorilla (Proc ZooL Soc, 1859X 



