and as quick as thought I, being bowman, grabbed the axe and
cut the line.

"'Blast you!' yelled the boat-steerer; 'what did you do that for?'

"'Do you want to be towed under?' I said. 'I should think we'd had
enough towing.'

"'Well,' says he, cooling down a bit, 'there's a fine whale gone off
with a good iron in him.'

"The other boats did not have much better luck than we did, seeing that
their whales got frightened and began to run. They chased the brutes for
two hours, and couldn't get anywhere near them. Then it commenced to get
late, and the ship hoisted the waif--"

"What's that?" asked Farmer Joe.

"That's the boat recall in a whaler," answered Handsome; "and when it
went up we had to go back to the ship, where we were jawed by the
Captain, and made fun of by the rest of the crew. Still, we didn't mind
that so very much, because, you know, it's pretty likely to be turn
about in a whaler, and you can't ever tell when an accident is going to
happen to the oldest hand. It was three days before we saw a whale
again. I was on lookout, and I caught sight of a spurt of spray away
down to leeward. I was hardly sure of it at first, but the next second
the whale rose on a sea, and I caught the flash of the sun on his shiny
wet back. So I bawled away as usual,

"'There blows!'

"'Only one?' yelled the Captain.

"'That's all, sir,' says I.

"'Well,' says he,' we'll make sure of him, anyhow.'

"So he gives orders to lower away three boats. These boats were to
spread out in running down on the whale, so that if he sounded he might
come up so near one of the outside ones as to give it a chance to go on
before he could recover from his surprise. Well, we had the outside
berth on the port side, and the mate of the _Two Cousins_ he had the
middle. The orders were to keep abreast in sailing down, and by easing
and trimming sheets, according as we went ahead or not, we managed to do
it pretty neatly. We had got down within two hundred and fifty yards of
the whale, when he began to swim ahead. He didn't seem to go very fast,
but he managed to keep us all about the same distance astern of him. All
of a sudden our boat-steerer says,

"'I know him!'

"'Get out!' says I; 'how can you know a whale?'

"'But I tell you I do,' says he, 'and if you had any sense you'd know
him too.'

"'How would I?' asks I.

"'Don't you see the harpoon sticking out of him?'

"I looked pretty hard, and, sure enough, there was a harpoo