to keep the vast frame of the mother whale (she was quite sixty feet
long: three times as long as Bill's shanty yonder) supplied with food.
This was just nibbling. When she felt that her baby had nursed enough,
she gave it a signal which it understood. It fell a little back along
her huge side. Then, lifting her enormous tail straight in the air,
she dived slowly downward into the pale, greenish glimmer of the deeper
tide, the calf keeping his place cleverly behind her protecting flipper.

"Down here the minute life of the ocean waters swarmed more densely
than at the surface. Swimming slowly, the mother whale filled her
mouth again and again with the tiny darting squid, till she had
strained out and swallowed perhaps a ton of the pulpy provender. As
they felt the whalebone strainers closing about them, each one took
alarm and let fly a jet of inky fluid, as if thinking to hide itself
from Fate; and the dim green of the surrounding water grew clouded till
the calf could hardly see, and had to crowd close to his mother's side.
A twist or two of her mighty flukes, like the screw of an ocean liner,
drove her clear of this obscurity, and carried her, a moment later,
into a packed shoal of southward journeying capelin."

The Babe's mouth opened for the natural question: "What's capelin?"

But Uncle Andy got ahead of him.

"That's a little fish something like a sardine," he explained hastily.
"And they travel in such countless numbers that sometimes a storm will
throw them ashore in long windrows like you see in a hay field, so that
the farmers come and cart them away for manure. Well, it did not take
long for the old whale to fill up even _her_ great stomach, when the
capelin were so numerous. She went ploughing through the shoal lazily,