efforts to upset me. But his limbs seemed soft and boneless; he had no
nails, no teeth, and he bounced and thumped and flapped and splashed
like a fish, while I rained blows on him with the boat-hook that
sounded like blows on a football. And all the while his gills were
blowing out and frothing, and purring, and his lidless eyes looked
into mine, until, nauseated and trembling, I dragged myself back to
the beach, where already the pretty nurse alternately wrung her hands
and her petticoats in ornamental despair.

Beyond the cove, Halyard was bobbing up and down, afloat in his
invalid's chair, trying to steer shoreward. He was the maddest man I
ever saw.

"Have you killed that rubber-headed thing yet?" he roared.

"I can't kill it," I shouted, breathlessly. "I might as well try to
kill a football!"

"Can't you punch a hole in it?" he bawled. "If I can only get at
him--"

His words were drowned in a thunderous splashing, a roar of great,
broad flippers beating the sea, and I saw the gigantic forms of my two
great auks, followed by their chicks, blundering past in a shower of
spray, driving headlong out into the ocean.

"Oh, Lord!" I said. "I can't stand that," and, for the first time in
my life, I fainted peacefully--and appropriately--at the feet of the
pretty nurse.