which saved my life in one of the weirdest adventures that has ever
befallen mortal man.

It was a placid day on the sea and Kippy and I were returning from a
ten-mile swim to a neighboring island whither I had been taken to be
shown off to some relatives.

"_Wak-wak,_" I had said when she first proposed the expedition, but she
had laughed gaily and nodded her head to indicate that there was not the
slightest danger, and, shamed into it, we had set forth and made an
excellent crossing.

On the return trip, midway between the two islands, I was floating
lazily, supported by a girdle of inflated dew-fish bladders and towed
by Kippy. She had propped over my head her verdant _taa-taa_
without which the natives never swim for fear of the tropical sun, and
I think I must have dozed off for I was suddenly roused by a hoarse
Klaxon-bellow "Kaaraschaa-gha!" which told me all too plainly that I
was in the most hideous peril.

_"Wak-wak!"_ I barked, and all my past life began to unfold before me.

It was a horrid sight--the _wak-wak,_ I mean. He was swimming on the
surface, and at ten feet I saw his great jaws open, lined with row
upon row of teeth that stretched back into his interior as far as the
eye could reach and farther. Mixed up with this dreadful reality were
visions of my past. I seemed to be peering into one of those vast,
empty auditoriums that had greeted my opera, "Jumping Jean," when it
was finally produced, privately.