“Aha, boy Rory!” was the reply; “we’ll have such sport as you never saw the likes o’ before!”
Rory now began to see there really was no joke about the matter; and Ralph, who was sitting next to him, pinched him for his doubt and misbelief. The two young men could read each other’s thoughts like books.
“Do you mean to say you are going to catch sharks in earnest, you know?” asked Rory.
“Well,” said Silas, with a bit of a laugh, “I’m going to have as good a try at it as ever I had. And as for catching ’em in earnest, I’m thinking it won’t be fun—for the sharks!”
“It is the Scymnus borealis, isn’t it?” said Dr Sandy McFlail, “belongin’, if my memory serves me, to the natural family Squalidae—a powerful brute, and a vera dangerous, too.”
“You may call him the Aurora borealis if you like, doctor,” said Silas; “and as for his family connections I know nought, but I daresay he comes from a jolly bad stock.”
“Natural history books,” said Allan, “don’t speak of their being so very numerous.”
“Natural history books!” reiterated Silas, with some warmth of disdain. “What do they know? what can they teach a man? Write a complete history of all the creatures that move about on God’s fair earth, that fly in His air or swim in His sea, and you’d fill Saint Paul’s with books from top to bottom—from the mighty cellars beneath to the golden cross itself. No, take my advice, boy Rory; if you want to study nature, put little faith in books. The classification is handy, say you? Yes, doctor; and I’ve seen a stripling fresh from college look as proud as a two-year-old peacock because he could spin you off the Greek names of a few specimens in the British Museum, though he couldn’t have told you the ways and habits of any one of them to save him from having his leave stopped. There is only one way, gentlemen, to study natural history; you must go to the great book of Nature itself—ay, and be content, and thankful, too, if, during even a long lifetime, you are able to learn the contents of even a single page of it.”
Rory, and the doctor, too, looked at Silas with a kind of new-born admiration; there was more in this man, with his weather-beaten, flower-pot-coloured face, than they had had any idea of.
“If I had time, gentlemen,” Silas added, “I could tell you some queer stories about sharks. ‘I reckon,’ as poor old Cobb used to say, that some o’ them would raise your hair a bit, too!”