Orca Gladiator. 
W E—a little girl of six, and myself—were 
seated upon a high, flat-topped, grassy 
headland of a lonely part of the northern coast 
of New South Wales, five miles from the old 
penal settlement of Port Macquarie. Three 
hundred feet below, the long Pacific rollers, 
unruffled by the faintest breath of air, swept 
in endless but surfless succession around a chain 
of black, isolated, and kelp-covered rocks that 
stood out from the shore at a distance of a 
cable-length or so. The tide was low, and 
some of the rocks raised their jagged, sun-dried 
summits perhaps six feet above the surface; 
others scarce a foot, so that each gentle swell 
as it came wavering shoreward poured over 
their faces in a creamy lather of foam ; others 
again were fathoms below, and their thick 
garments of kelp and weed swayed to and fro 
unceasingly to the sweep of the ocean roll above 
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