Читать книгу Idylls of the Sea, and Other Marine Sketches онлайн

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Within the immediate range of her glance a vast black shadow obscured a wide, irregularly shaped area of the blazing sunshine. It was so calm that the shadow seemed stationary. In the direction of this cool penumbra her gaze lingered earnestly. For hereditary instinct as well as long experience gave her the knowledge that from the substance of such shadows came food dropping down, varied and toothsome, actually alive upon rare occasions. Somewhat impatiently she wondered at the long time that her little blue and gold attendant had been gone. He was so seldom absent from his place between her eyes for a whole minute that she got quite uneasy. But while she fidgeted fretfully, with many twitchings of her flexible “gaff topsail,” back came the pilot-fish in a tearing hurry. “Now then, partner, move along, do. There’s a lump of fat pork almost as big as your head hanging over that ship’s stern. I don’t quite understand why it doesn’t sink, but it is good. I nibbled just a crumb, and you can be sure this time that it’s no bagful of cinders like that nasty mouthful that gave you the chest-ache so bad this morning.” The latter part of this energetic exordium was lost upon Mother Shark, being drowned in the wash set up by her great tail-fin, which was going in grand style, starting her off at such a rate that two or three stragglers of the family had to skip like shrimps to get indoors before they were left behind and lost.