272 By Stream and Sea. 



astern, affording us a fair view of their kind. They were 

 handsome fellows, about two feet long, with roundish body 

 and mottled blue back — in short, an overgrown mackerel. 

 Indulging in useless regrets never pays ; for all which I 

 should not have bemoaned the fate that had given me a 

 few hours amongst the bonito in a nice little sprit-sail boat, 

 with a certain whiffling apparatus twirling along the wake. 



Before setting forth on my long voyage, I received from 

 a very clever friend a letter, in which this sentence occurred : 

 " Do not omit to slay the regulation shark with the silver 

 watch and seals and the partially-digested pair of boots in 

 his interior, and do not try to investigate his mysteries until 

 you have divided the spinal narrow just above the tail, 

 secundum artem, with an axe, while Neptune and Amphi- 

 trite, and all the rest of them, are holding high jinks at the 

 equator." 



Now, it so happened that on the afternoon which intro- 

 duced us to the bonitos, and not far from the spot whence 

 they had leaped, after the manner of roach eluding the grab 

 of Master Jack, an innocent bit of fan-shaped leather, as it 

 would appear, protruded from the water. Strange to say, 

 it veered round and began to sail leisurely off in the wind's 

 eye. It was a rascally white shark ; and even he did not 

 fancy the noise of our revolving screw, though plainly on 

 the war-path in general, with a design in particular upon the 

 bonito. 



So runs the world, my masters — shark eats bonito, bonito 

 eats flying fish, flying fish eats other fry, and other fry eats 

 something else. 



One of the officers had in his cabin a walking-stick, of 

 which he was very proud — a richly-mounted and highly- 

 polished staff, that had once "officiated" as the spine of 

 a great shark. 



