lves with
raw eggs, just as I had been doing, and they were evidently the terror
of the birds. I saw one who had managed in some way to capture a duck
nearly as large as himself, and was bouncing up the hill--to his den, no
doubt--with the poor thing's neck in his mouth, and its body across his
shoulder.

"Then, too, I discovered, from the east side of the island, where the
ice was solid, a great number of seals lying in the sun, as if asleep,
on the ice; and when I came around on the west side, where the sea was
open, great schools of walruses, with their long tusks and ugly heads,
were sporting about in the water as if at play, and an equally large
number of the narwhal, with their long horns, were also playing there.
Only that they are larger, and have these hideous-looking tusks,
walruses are much like seals. The narwhal is a small species of whale,
being about twenty feet long, and spotted something like an iron-gray
horse. Its great peculiarity is the horn, which grows, like that of a
sword-fish, straight out of the nose, and is nearly half as long as the
body. Like all the other whales, it must come up to the surface of the
water to breathe; and its breathing is done through a hole in the top of
the head, like any other whale's. You know the breathing of a whale is
called 'spouting,' or 'blowing,'--that is, when he breathes out it is so
called, and when he does this he makes the spray fly up into the air.

"This breathing of the largest whales can be seen several miles; that
is, I should say, the spray thrown up by their breath. So you see the
common expression of the whale-fishers, 'There she blows!' is a very
good one; for sometimes, when the whale is very large, the spray looks
like a small waterspout in the sea.

"Besides the narwhal, which I have told you about, I saw another kind of
whale, even smaller still. This is called the white whale, though it
isn't exactly white, but a sort of cream-color. They had no horns,
however, like the narwhal; and they skimmed along through the water in
great numbers, and very close together, and when they come to the
surface they breathe so quickly that the noise they make is like a sharp
hiss.

[Illustration: John Hardy making Discoveries.]

"Considering the numbers of these animals,--the seals and walruses and
narwhals and white whales,--I was not surprised, when I went close down
to the beach, to find a great quantity of their bones there, evidently
of animals that