ments more
we reached the hen-coop, and Fred was saved!

He was half dead with cold and exhaustion, poor fellow, but in a few
minutes he began to recover, and before we reached the ship he could
speak. His first words were to thank God for his deliverance. Then he
added:

"And, thanks to the man that flung that light overboard. I should have
gone down but for that. It showed me where the hen-coop was."

I cannot describe the feeling of joy that filled my heart when he said
this.

"Aye, who wos it that throw'd that fire overboard?" enquired one of the
men.

"Don't know," replied another, "I think it wos the cap'n."

"You'll find that out when we get aboard," cried the mate; "pull away,
lads."

In five minutes Fred Borders was passed up the side and taken down
below. In two minutes more we had him stripped naked, rubbed dry,
wrapped in hot blankets, and set down on one of the lockers, with a hot
brick at his feet, and a stiff can of hot rum and water in his hand.

CHAPTER VI

THE WHALE--FIGHTING BULLS, ETC.

As the reader may, perhaps, have been asking a few questions about the
whale in his own mind, I shall try to answer them, by telling a few
things concerning that creature which, I think, are worth knowing.

In the first place, the whale is not a fish! I have applied that name
to it, no doubt, because it is the custom to do so; but there are great
differences between the whales and the fishes. The mere fact that the
whale lives in water is not sufficient to prove it to be a fish. The
frog lives very much in water--he is born in the water, and, when very
young, he lives in it altogether--would die, in fact, if he were taken
out of it; yet a frog is not a fish.

The following are some of the differences existing between a whale and
a fish:--The whale is a warm-blooded animal; the fish is cold-blooded.
The whale brings forth its young alive; while most fishes lay eggs or
spawn. Moreover, the fish lives entirely under water, but the whale
cannot do so. He breathes air through enormous lungs, not gills. If
you were to hold a whale's head under water for much longer than an
hour, it would certainly be drowned; and this is the reason why it
comes so frequently to the surface of the sea to take breath. Whales
seldom stay more than an hour under water, and when they come up to
breathe, they discharge the last breath they took through their
nostrils or blowholes, mixed with large quantities of w