“Ah! but, gentlemen, you should have seen a two-mile run I had not five years ago from a bear. Silas himself wouldn’t have believed that Silas could have done the distance in double the time. He was coming home all by himself, when he burst his rifle firing at a seal, and just at that moment up popped a bear.
“‘All alone, are you, Silas?’ Bruin seemed to say.
“‘Yes,’ replied Silas, moving off; ‘and I don’t want your company either. I know my way, thank you.’
“‘Oh, I daresay you do!’ says the bear. ‘But it will only be friendly like if I see you home. Wait a bit.’
“‘Never a wait!’ said Silas; and so the race began.
“Of course they saw it from the ship, and sent men to meet me and settle Bruin. Puffed? I should think I was! I lay on my face for five minutes, with no more breath in my old bellows than there is in a dead badger?”
“You’ve seen the sea-lion, I suppose, Captain Grig?” said Allan.
“I have that!” replied Silas, “and the sea-bear, too, and I don’t know which of the two I’d rather meet on the top of a berg, for they are vicious brutes both.”
“I’ve read some very interesting accounts of them,” said Allan, “in the encyclopaedias.”
“So have I,” laughed old Silas, “written by men who had never seen them out of the Brighton Aquarium. Pardon me, but you cannot study nature from books.”