. The creature must have been miraculously led
there to go through its appointed performance. It must also have been
"prepared," to use the language of the Bible, in a very remarkable way,
for the gullet of a whale is not large enough to allow of the passage
of an object exceeding the size of an ordinary herring. Swallowing
Jonah must have been a tough job after the utmost preparation. With a
frightfully distended throat, however, the whale did its best, and by
dint of hard striving at last got Jonah down.

Having properly taken Jonah in out of the wet, the poor whale doubtless
surmised that its troubles had ended. But alas they had only just begun!
Swallowing a prophet is one thing; digesting him is another. For three
days and three nights the whale struggled desperately to digest
Jonah, and for three days and nights Jonah obstinately refused to _be_
digested. Never in the entire course of its life had it experienced such
a difficulty. During the whole of that period, too, Jonah carried on a
kind of prayer meeting, and the strange rumbling in its belly must have
greatly added to the poor animal's discomfort At last it grew heartily
sick of Jonah, and vomited him up on dry land. We have no doubt that
it swam away into deep waters, a sadder but wiser whale; and that ever
afterwards, instead of bolting its food, it narrowly scrutinised every
morsel before swallowing it, to make sure it wasn't another prophet.
According to its experience, prophets were decidedly the most
unprofitable articles of consumption.

We are of course aware that the narrative states that "the Lord spake
unto the fish, and it vomited Jonah upon the dry land." But this we
conceive to be a mere pleasantry on the part of the unknown author. The
idea of the Lord whispering into a whale's ear is ineffably ludicrous:
besides, the whale had a very natural inclination to rid itself of
Jonah, and needed no divine prompting.

Jonah's prayer "unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly" is very
amusing. There is not a sentence in it which bears any reference to
the prophet's circumstances. It is a kind of Psalm, after the manner of
those ascribed to David. Our belief is that the author found it floating
about, and thinking it would do for Jonah, inserted it in his narrative,
without even taking the trouble to furbish it into decent keeping with
the situation.

The word of the Lord came unto Jonah a second time, and presuming no
more to disobey, he went t