er,
drove her clear of this obscurity, and carried her, a moment later,
into a packed shoal of southward journeying capelin."

The Babe's mouth opened for the natural question: "What's capelin?"

But Uncle Andy got ahead of him.

"That's a little fish something like a sardine," he explained hastily.
"And they travel in such countless numbers that sometimes a storm will
throw them ashore in long windrows like you see in a hay field, so that
the farmers come and cart them away for manure. Well, it did not take
long for the old whale to fill up even _her_ great stomach, when the
capelin were so numerous. She went ploughing through the shoal lazily,
and stopped at last to rub her little one softly with her flipper.

"All at once she caught sight of a curious-looking creature swimming
just beneath the shoal of capelin, and every now and then opening its
mouth to gulp down a bushel or so of them. It was about fifteen feet
long, of a ghastly grayish white color, and from its snout stood
straight out a sharp, twisted horn perhaps six feet in length. It was
only a stupid narwhal, with no desire in the world to offend his
gigantic neighbor: but she was nervous at the sight of his horn, which
made her think of her dreaded enemy the swordfish. Tucking her baby
well under her fin, she made an hysterical rush at the unoffending
stranger. His little pig-like eyes blinked anxiously, and, darting off
at his best pace, he was speedily lost to view in the cloudy myriads of
the capelin.

"Having now been under water for some twelve or fifteen minutes, the
mother whale knew that it was time for her baby to breathe
again--though she herself could have held on without fresh air for
another five or even ten minutes without much trouble."

The Babe gasped. It was like a bad dream to him, the idea of going
along without a breath.

"Oh, how it must hurt!" he burst forth. "I should think it would kill
them."

"It would kill you, of course, in about two minutes," replied Uncle
Andy. "But they are built differently. They have a handy way of doing
up a lot of breathing all at once, and then not having to think any
more about it for a while. You can readily see what a convenience that
might be to them.

"When they got back to the surface, they lay comfortably rocking among
the green swells, while they both blew all the used-up air and steam
out of their lungs. The feathery little jet of the calf rose gravely
beside his mother's