the captain answered. "Do you hear anything
of the third boat?"

"No, sir," answered the old whaler, after shouting a loud "Ahoy!" to
which but one answer was returned, "but we'll see her, likely, when the
fog lifts."

"Doesn't lift much here," the captain said. "But with this offshore
wind, they ought to hear the seals three or four miles away."

In the meantime the whale-boat was forging through the water slowly and
the noise of the seals grew louder every minute. The sun was rising, but
the fog was so dense that it was barely possible to tell which was the
east.

"Funny kind of fog," said Colin; "seems to me it's about as wet as the
water!"

"Reg'lar seal fog," Hank replied. "If it wasn't always foggy the seals
wouldn't haul out here, an' anyway, there's always a lot of fog around
a rookery. Must be the breath of so many thousands o' seals, I reckon."

[Illustration: SPEARING SEALS AT SEA.

Pelagic sealing by Aleut natives now forbidden by the governments of the
United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Japan.

_Courtesy of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries._]

"Pretty things, seals," said the boy.

"Where did you ever see any?" his friend queried.

"Oh, lots of places," Colin answered, "circuses and aquariums and places
like that. I even saw a troupe of them on the stage once, playing ball.
They put up a good game, too."

"Those weren't the real fur seals," Hank replied; "what you saw were the
common hair seals, an' they're not the same at all. You can't keep fur
seals alive in a tank!"

"There are two fur seals in the aquarium of the Fisheries Building at
Washington," interposed the captain, "but those are the only two."

"There!" cried the boy, pointing at the water; "there's one now!"

"You'll see them by hundreds in a few minutes, boy," the captain said.
"I think I make out land."

As he spoke, an eddy of wind blew aside part of the fog, revealing
through the rift a low-lying island. Within a minute the fog had closed
down again, but the glimpse had been enough to give the captain his
bearings. The noise from the seal-rookery had grown deafening, so that
the men had to shout to one another in the boat and presently--and quite
unexpectedly--the boat was in the midst of dozens upon dozens of seals,
throwing themselves out of the water, standing on their hind flippers,
turning somersaults, and performing all manner of antics.

"Why don't we land?" asked Colin, as he noticed that the boat was
runni