venient kind of soup, a _live_ soup, that
they fed upon. The sea, in great spots and patches, is full of tiny
creatures, sometimes jelly-fish, sometimes little squid of various
kinds, all traveling in countless hosts from somewhere-or-other to
somewhere else, they know not why. As the great mother whale lay there
with her mouth open, these swarming little swimmers would calmly swim
into it, never dreaming that it was a mouth. There they would get
tangled among those long narrow strips or plates of whale-bone, with
their fringed edges. Every little while the whale would lazily close
her mouth, thrust forward her enormous fat tongue, and force the water
out through this whalebone sieve of hers. It was like draining a dish
of string beans through a colander. Having swallowed the mess of
jellyfish and squid, she would open her mouth again, and wait for
another lot to come in. It was a very easy and comfortable way to get
a bite of breakfast, while waiting for her baby to finish nursing. And
every little while, from the big blowhole or nostril on top of her head
she would 'spout,' or send up a spray-like jet of steamy breath. And
every little while, too, the big-headed baby under her flipper would
send up a baby spout, as if in imitation of his mother.

"You must not think, however, that this lazy way of feeding was enough
to keep the vast frame of the mother whale (she was quite sixty feet
long: three times as long as Bill's shanty yonder) supplied with food.
This was just nibbling. When she felt that her baby had nursed enough,
she gave it a signal which it understood. It fell a little back along
her huge side. Then, lifting her enormous tail straight in the air,
she dived slowly downward into the pale, greenish glimmer of the deeper
tide, the calf keeping his place cleverly behind her protecting flipper.

"Down here the minute life of the ocean waters swarmed more densely
than at the surface. Swimming slowly, the mother whale filled her
mouth again and again with the tiny darting squid, till she had
strained out and swallowed perhaps a ton of the pulpy provender. As
they felt the whalebone strainers closing about them, each one took
alarm and let fly a jet of inky fluid, as if thinking to hide itself
from Fate; and the dim green of the surrounding water grew clouded till
the calf could hardly see, and had to crowd close to his mother's side.
A twist or two of her mighty flukes, like the screw of an ocean lin