"Not always; the color may vary from black to creamy white; and sometimes it is striped dark and light."
"Is there much of it in one whale, papa?"
"Yes, a great deal on each side of the jaw; there are more than three hundred of the plates, which, in a fine specimen, are about ten or twelve feet long and eleven inches wide at their base; and so much as a ton's weight has been taken from a large whale."
"And is the baleen all they kill the whales for, papa?"
"Oh, no, my son! the oil is very valuable, and there is a great deal of it in a large whale. One has been told of which yielded eighty-five barrels of oil."
"Oh, my! that's a great deal," cried Ned. "What a big fellow he must have been to hold so much as that."
"The whale is very valuable to the people of the polar regions," continued the Captain. "They eat the flesh, and drink the oil."
"Oh, papa! drink oil!" cried little Elsie, with a shudder of disgust.
"It seems very disgusting to us," he said, with a smile, "but in that very cold climate it is an absolute necessity—needful, in order to keep up the heat of the body by a bountiful supply of carbon."
"Whales are so big and strong it must be very dangerous to go near them, I suppose," said Elsie, with an inquiring look at her father.