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A Sack of Shakings

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Shining serenely as some immeasurable mirror beneath the smiling face of heaven, the solitary ocean lay in unrippled silence. It was in those placid latitudes south of the line in the Pacific, where weeks, aye months, often pass without the marginless blue level being ruffled by any wandering keel. Here, in almost perfect security from molestation by man, the innumerable denizens of the deep pursue their never-ending warfare, doubtless enjoying to the full the brimming cup of life, without a weary moment, and with no dreary anticipations of an unwanted old age.

Now it fell on a day that the calm surface of that bright sea was broken by the sudden upheaval of a compact troop of sperm whales from the inscrutable depths wherein they had been roaming and recruiting their gigantic energies upon the abundant molluscs, hideous of mien and insatiable of maw, that, like creations of a diseased mind, lurked far below the sunshine. The school consisted of seven cows and one mighty bull, who was unique in appearance, for instead of being in colour the unrelieved sepia common to his kind he was curiously mottled with creamy white, making the immense oblong cube of his head look like a weather-worn monolith of Siena marble. Easeful as any Arabian khalif, he lolled supine upon the glittering folds of his couch, the welcoming wavelets caressing his vast form with gentlest touch, and murmuring softly as by their united efforts they rocked him in rhythm with their melodic lullaby. Around him glided his faithful harem—gentle timid creatures, no one of them a third of their lord’s huge bulk, but still majestic in their proportions, being each some forty-five feet in length by thirty in girth. Unquestionably the monarch of the flood, their great chief accepted in complacent dignity their unremitting attentions, nor did their playful gambols stir him in the least from his attitude of complete repose.