"'Do you want to be towed under?' I said. 'I should think we'd had enough towing.'
"'Well,' says he, cooling down a bit, 'there's a fine whale gone off with a good iron in him.'
"The other boats did not have much better luck than we did, seeing that their whales got frightened and began to run. They chased the brutes for two hours, and couldn't get anywhere near them. Then it commenced to get late, and the ship hoisted the waif—"
"What's that?" asked Farmer Joe.
"That's the boat recall in a whaler," answered Handsome; "and when it went up we had to go back to the ship, where we were jawed by the Captain, and made fun of by the rest of the crew. Still, we didn't mind that so very much, because, you know, it's pretty likely to be turn about in a whaler, and you can't ever tell when an accident is going to happen to the oldest hand. It was three days before we saw a whale again. I was on lookout, and I caught sight of a spurt of spray away down to leeward. I was hardly sure of it at first, but the next second the whale rose on a sea, and I caught the flash of the sun on his shiny wet back. So I bawled away as usual,
"'There blows!'
"'Only one?' yelled the Captain.
"'That's all, sir,' says I.
"'Well,' says he,' we'll make sure of him, anyhow.'
"So he gives orders to lower away three boats. These boats were to spread out in running down on the whale, so that if he sounded he might come up so near one of the outside ones as to give it a chance to go on before he could recover from his surprise. Well, we had the outside berth on the port side, and the mate of the Two Cousins he had the middle. The orders were to keep abreast in sailing down, and by easing and trimming sheets, according as we went ahead or not, we managed to do it pretty neatly. We had got down within two hundred and fifty yards of the whale, when he began to swim ahead. He didn't seem to go very fast, but he managed to keep us all about the same distance astern of him. All of a sudden our boat-steerer says,