"Do you mean that great creatures like whales feed on such tiny things as these?"
"Yes, my boy," said the captain; "and I daresay they are as nice to them as semolina and ground rice are to you.
When a whale gets into the middle of them he has nothing to do but to open his jaws, and, in a minute, hundreds of thousands of these minute creatures are inside the fringe or whalebone around his palate, and he is sure of a good mouthful."
"So you see, Jack," said Dick, "the whale gets his shrimps without the trouble of shelling them."
"And when he has just closed his snappers is the very time to give him a good taste of the harpoon," added Captain Hull.
The words had hardly escaped the captain's lips when a shout from one of the sailors announced,-
"A whale to larboard!"
"There's the whale!" repeated the captain. All his professional instincts were aroused in an instant, and he hurried to the bow, followed in eager curiosity by all the stern passengers.
Even Cousin Benedict loitered up in the rear, constrained, in spite of himself, to take a share in the general interest.
There was no doubt about the matter. Four miles or so to windward an unusual commotion in the water betokened to experienced eyes the presence of a whale; but the distance was too great to permit a reasonable conjecture to be formed as to which species of those mammifers the creature belonged.