Well, the bear did not seem to be at all in a hurry. The first thing he did, after he got into the boat, was to shake himself as hard as he could, to get the water out of his coat. After that, he walked slowly to one end of the boat, just as if he was quite at home there, and lay down upon a coat which one of the men had brought along, and went to sleep.

The sailors saw then that all they had to do was to row the bear to the shore. So they went to work. When they got to the ship, the captain and all the sailors laughed a good deal, you may be sure. The shore was not far off. The sailors rowed until the boat touched the shore, and the bear got out, and walked slowly away. He did not so much as thank the men for the ride he had been taking. But the men were glad to get rid of him, thanks or no thanks.




CATCHING WHALES.

I went in a whale-ship once. I was gone from home that time more than three years. When we came back, we had our large ship all full of oil and whalebone. We got the oil and the whalebone out of the whales which we had caught. Whales, you know, are very large fish. They sometimes get two or three hundred barrels of oil from one single whale.

I never shall forget what a long chase I had with a whale once. Shall I tell you about it, little friend? There was a man in the ship who was looking out for whales. In a whale-ship there is always one man who gets up as high as he can, and keeps a bright look-out all round for whales. Whales do not stay under water all the time. The trout, and the shad, and the eel, and most other kinds of fish can stay under water all the time. They cannot live out of the water only a few minutes, and I suppose they feel almost as bad out of the water as we do in it. But the whale wants to come up to the top of the water. He wants to come up to breathe. Well, all at once, the man who was looking out the day I speak of, when I had such a run, sung out as loud as he could, "There she blows!" We all knew what that meant. That is what they always say when they see a whale. It means, "There is a whale come up to breathe." This whale was a great way off. I should think he was a mile from the ship.

Well, the captain told some of us to get into a boat, and to go out after the whale. We did so. The boats are always kept ready, and it takes only a minute to let the boat down, and start off. We rowed as fast as we could, until we came up near where the whale was lying. Oh, what a large whale! As soon as the boat got near enough, one man threw two harpoons at the whale, and they both stuck fast in his flesh. A harpoon is a long and sharp iron, made like a spear, so that when it strikes the whale, it goes in deep, and you cannot pull it out. The harpoon is fastened to a long rope, and the rope is tied to the boat.

As soon as the whale felt these irons in his side, he began to run. I never knew before that a whale could swim so fast. It took him only a very little while to run out with all the loose rope; and our boat went through the water pretty fast, you may be sure. I was afraid the whale would take it into his head to dive down towards the bottom. If he had gone down, we should have gone with him, unless we could have cut the rope. But he did not go down. Away we went, as fast as if we had been on a railroad. He was all the time taking us further from the ship. "Well," we thought, "what is going to become of us!" The whale did not seem to care any thing about that. I suppose he thought that was our look-out, and not his.

But the fellow got tired out by and by. He had bled so much, that he began to grow faint. At last he went so slow, that we rowed up to him, and stabbed him with a long knife. He died pretty soon after that, and we got more than two hundred barrels of oil out of him.

Catching whales seems a cruel business to you. It is a cruel business. I never liked it. But somebody must do it. The butcher who kills oxen, and sheep, and calves, has to be cruel. But we must have butchers. We must have people to kill whales, though you never will catch me chasing after a whale again, as long as my name is Jack Mason.

Whales do not always run like the one I have told you about. Sometimes they fight. After they are struck with the harpoon, they lift their tail, or fluke, as they call it, and strike the boat so hard as to dash it in pieces. Then the poor sailors have to swim to the ship if they can. If they cannot, and if there is no other boat near them that they can get into, they must drown.

I once saw a whale that had been struck with a harpoon come up close to the ship, and give it such a blow with his fluke, that he tore the copper off at a great rate, and broke a thick plank in half a dozen pieces.








MORE INDIANS.

When I went in the whale-ship, I saw another tribe of Indians, that were very different from those I told you of before. They knew more than those Indians. They used bows and arrows; and you would have been pleased to see how they would hit a mark a great way off, with their arrows.

One of them, who had a name so long that I will not try to speak it, used to come every day to our ship, when we were lying near the shore. He liked pieces of glass, and nails and tin, and things of that kind, quite as well as the other Indians I told you of. He had seen white men before, so he was not at all afraid of us. I suppose that almost all the white men he had seen before used rum and tobacco. He asked all our sailors for these two things, and kept asking every day. I am sorry to say that some of the men gave him some rum once in a while, and one day he drank so much that he got drunk. Poor man! He was not so much to blame, I think, as the bad sailors that gave him the rum. What do you think about it?

This man would dive in the water further than anybody I ever saw before or since. Some of the sailors used to throw pieces of tin into very deep water, and tell him he might have them if he would dive and bring them up. He was so fond of such things, that he would always gladly dive to get them.

I once saw him dive for an old worn-out knife. The water was very deep where it was thrown. It was so deep that none of us thought he would get it. He went down, and staid a long, long time. We thought he never would come up again. The sailor that threw the knife into the water began to be sorry he had done it, because he thought the poor Indian was drowned. But, by and by, he came up again, with the knife in his mouth. He had been hunting after the knife on the bottom of the sea.

These Indians had boats which were made of the bark of trees. They were so light, that an Indian could carry one of them on his shoulder.

The man who used to come to the ship so often, brought his little girl with him one day. She was not more than six or seven years old. She had never seen any white men before, and at first she was afraid of us all. But when she saw that the white folks would not hurt her any more than the Indians would, she liked us very well, and wanted to stay with us all the time. The captain showed her his watch, and she looked at it a long time. She thought she had never seen so strange a thing before. "Is it alive?" she asked her father. He could not tell whether it was alive or not, any more than the little girl could.

The captain liked the little girl very well. He wanted to take her home with him. So he asked her father if his little girl might go a great way off, where the white men lived. The Indians could not talk like us. They could talk, but they did not use the same words. The captain made out to tell the Indian what he wanted, by using signs, just as he would have done if he had been talking with a deaf and dumb man. And what do you think the father of that little girl said, when he knew that the captain wanted to take the girl home with him? If anybody should ask your father if he would let you go away and never come back again, you can tell what your father would say. He would say, "No, I cannot spare my dear little child."





But the Indian said, "Yes, give me some money, and you can take my little girl, and carry her away with you. I have got more girls in my house." The little Indian girl wanted to go with us, so the captain gave her father some money, and when the ship sailed, he took her along with him. But the poor Indian girl did not live till our ship got home. She was taken very sick, and died. We all felt very bad when she left us. We had taught her a great many things. She could read a little. She knew all her letters, and could spell out such easy words as there are in your little primers and picture books. She did not know any thing about God, and Christ, and heaven, before she came to the ship. But some of us told her about them. She was glad to hear about them. Oh, how her bright eyes did sparkle when she heard that Christ came into the world, and died for such little girls as she! How happy it made her, to think that He loved her! By and by, she used to pray every night, when she went to bed. I taught her to say that sweet little prayer which you know so well, and love so well:

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