again.... Some of them have
nicknames, and each is well known to his human friends.

"Presently the watchman sees, away to the southward, a white, misty
puff, then another, and another. In an instant he brings his glass to
bear. 'Humpback!' Quickly two flags flutter from the flagpole, and a
fire is lit; and as the flags and smoke are seen, the waiting boats'
crews at the trying-out station are galvanised into life by the cry
of 'Rush, ho, lads! Humpbacks in sight, steering north-west! Rush and
tumble into the boats and away!'

"Round the south head sweeps the first boat, the second following more
leisurely, for she is only a 'pickup' or relief, in case the first is
'fluked' and the crew are tossed high in air, with their boat crushed
into matchwood, or meets with some other disaster. And as the leading
boat rises to the long ocean swell of the offing, the killers close in
round her on either side, just keeping clear of the sweep of the oars,
and 'breaching' and leaping and spouting with the anticipative zest of
the coming bloody fray.

"'Easy, lads, easy!' says the old boat-header; 'they are coming right
down on us. Billy has right. They're humpbacks, sure enough!'

"The panting oarsmen pull a slower stroke, and then, as they watch the
great savage creatures which swim alongside, they laugh in the mirthless
manner peculiar to most native-born Australians, for suddenly, with a
last sharp spurt of vapour, the killers dive and disappear into the dark
blue beneath; for they have heard the whales, and, as is their custom,
have gone ahead of the boat, rushing swiftly on below fully fifty
fathoms deep. Fifteen minutes later they rise to the surface in the
midst of the humpbacks, and half a square acre of ocean is turned into a
white, swirling cauldron of foam and leaping spray. The bull-dogs of the
sea have seized the largest whale of the pod or school--a bull--and are
holding him for the boat and for the deadly lance of his human foes.
The rest of the humpbacks rise high their mighty flukes and 'sound'
a hundred--two hundred--fathoms down, and, speeding seaward, leave the
unfortunate bull to his dreadful fate.

("And in truth it is a dreadful fate, and the writer of this sketch can
never forget one day, as he and a little girl of six watched, from a
grassy headland on the coast of New South Wales, the slaughter of a
monstrous whale by a drove of killers, that the child wept and shuddered
and hid her face against his shou