We were sitting at breakfast on deck under the awning, next morning, Donovan having returned for his traps, and the frigate's boat was towing astern—Dicky Phantom was part and portion of our society—the carpenter having already got a little chair so contrived, that when lashed to the leg of the table, he could not fall out of it.
The frigate was about a mile to the northward of us, looming like a seventy-four, as she glimmered through the hot blue haze that hung over the horizon, and circumscribed our view on all sides, for it was stark calm. The sun shone down with true tropical intensity; the heaving swell was like a sea of molten silver, and every now and then a dolphin would leap close to us, while, as from the side of a watery hill, a shower of flying-fish would spring out and shoot across a liquid valley, until they dropped like a discharge of grape into the next billow.
Nothing nourishes one's grog-drinking propensities, or spoils one's beauty so much, as the reflection of the sun from the glass-like surface of the calm sea within the tropics. His direct rays are in some measure warded off by your hat-brim; but were you even to turn up your ugly phiz at him, and stare him in the face, they would have comparatively no effect, to the fierceness of their heat second-hand in this way. Oh, the sickening effect of the afternoon's glare, thus reflected, and flashed up into your face, under the snout of your chapeau, which here, like a battery taken in reverse, proves no defence, until your eyes are blinded, and your cheeks routed and roasted, and your neb peeled, like an ill-scraped radish, leaving the underskin so tender, that breaking on the wheel is comfort to blowing your nose. Cold cream—cold cream! Oh, for a pot of it, ye gods!
I have before said, we were not, where we sat, much above four feet out of the water, and several flying-fish had come on board that morning; so just as I was helping Dicky to a little water, to wash down the soaked biscuit that, through Lennox's kindness, he had been feeding on, dash—a very large one flew right againt Dennis Donovan's cheek, and dropped walloping and floundering into his plate.
"Blazes, what is that?"
"Oh, what a beautiful leetle fis!" said the child.
But Dennis, honest man, did not recover his equanimity during the whole meal.
Immediately after breakfast, as he was preparing to go on board of the Gazelle, and to part company regularly, one of the men, who was looking out astern, sung out in a low tone, as if afraid the fish should hear, "A shark, sir, close under the stern." We gently hauled the frigate's boat alongside, to be out of the way, and, on looking over the tafferel, there was the monster, sure enough, about three feet below the surface of the clear green water, eyeing us with the greatest composure.
As if noways daunted, but rather determined to have a nearer and better view of us, he gradually floated up, until his dorsal fin was a foot out of the water, and his head but just covered by it. We instantly got a hook baited, and let down. The fish was about twelve feet long; and, as I leant over the low stern of the vessel, when she sank on the fall of the swell, I could have touched the monster's head with a handspike. There was something very exciting in being on terms of such intimacy with a creature who would have thought it capital sport to have nipped you in two.
He eyed the bait and the hook, and then drew back about a yard from it, and ogled me again, as much as to say,—"Not to be had so clumsily, Master Brail; but if you would oblige me with one of your legs, now, or even an arm, I would vastly prefer it to the piece of rancid salt pork you offer me on that rusty piece of crooked iron there."