As soon as I recovered my breath, I answered politely, “Indeed! Your Majesty wears well. I should hardly have thought it. Are your Majesty’s parents living?”
“How’d I know,” he grumbled, peeping fiercely at me out of the corner of his starboard eye. “Don’t go much on parients ermong our peepul. Next please!”
“Where did your venerability do us the honour to be born, if the question be allowable?” I queried timidly.
“Here,” he roared, with a resounding crash of his enormous tail on the surface; “where’d ye think I’d be born but at sea?”
Deficient in locality evidently, I thought, being a bit of a phrenologist myself, though it would have required a theodolite to survey the bumps upon his capacious cranium. But as he showed signs of irritability, I added quickly, “Are you married, your Majesty, or how?”
“Well; I should cackle,” he said—“married, hay! Why one of your (an awful reverberation suggested a powerful adjective) slush-tubs hez jest broke up one uv the purtiest little harems I ever collected, twelve ravishin’ beauties sech ez any monark’d be proud of. Well thar, hurry up; I’m jest reminded ov an ole schoolmate uv mine ’s got mose ’s good erwun. He’s usin’ roun’ the Bonins ’baout now, ’n’ I mus’ git over thar ’n’ b’reave him. Royal rights, y’know,” and his Majesty shed a ponderous wink.
“What does your Majesty do for a living?” I ventured to inquire.
“Eat!” he roared. “Harpoons en bomb-guns, what dz ennybody du fr a livin’? I never heerd sech a barnacle-headed grampus ’n all my fishin’.” With that he lifted up his tremendous caput out of water and exposed his Blackwall tunnel of a mouth, as who should remark, “Not much room for other occupation in a whale’s life when a gulf like this needs attention.”
I suppose I looked a bit preoccupied, for he hastily added, “But I never eat sech insecks ez you be.”
“What, never?” I ventured to murmur.