100 The Shark 



present pang of parting. They lay side by side all 

 silently, with fins and tails gently vibrating and con- 

 veying all that they needed to express between them. 

 Suddenly the male Shark gave one great sweep of his 

 tail and was gone. Yet not so swiftly but that a bright 

 blue spot behind him had darted forward and taken up 

 its station just above his broad snout as he steadily 

 plunged southward toward the roaring forties. 



Only a little time elapsed, and then, sedately as 

 became a matron with growing responsibility, the lady 

 Shark got under way also and proceeded due east. 

 And in like manner as at the departure of her husband 

 a tiny blue form shot out from the shadows behind her 

 and took up its station over her broad nose. She was 

 a fine specimen of the Common Shark, about nine feet 

 long with a dark grey skin and a dorsal fin (gafftopsail 

 of the sailor) that when she neared the surface stood 

 up nearly a foot out of the water. Her head was 

 eighteen inches across and the upper lobe of her tail 

 was nearly two feet long, with an auxiliary fin on it six 

 inches deep. She was six years old, and had been 

 round the Cape of Good Hope as many times as she had 

 years of age, and yet she was entirely dependent upon 

 the goodwill, fidelity, and skiU of that tiny blue thing 

 which kept its position above her nose without any 

 apparent movement as she steadily made her way to 

 the east. 



It was a ' pilot ' fish, one of the most beautiful as 

 well as one of the smallest of the Scombridae, the great 

 mackerel family, unique, however, in its strange love 

 for the society of the Shark and its self-constituted 

 pilotage of that great fish. Here, in parenthesis, I 

 would remark upon the strange way in which men's 

 minds are constituted. The fantastic tales about 

 Sharks before noted wiU be accepted without a boggle 



