Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/32

 Some new hand may have been told to stand, by to push the line under the bows; but beyond a joke or two, the event was as unmarked as the line itself.

We had by this time seen the usual sea sights, so important a variety in life to those who for months plough the endless succession of ocean billows without a change of scene or company. Among these were flying-fish in shoals; like glittering arrows darting from the water, they skim through the air for a hundred yards or so, and drop into the wave that meets them; their enemy, the dolphin, swift as lightning in the pursuit of his prey, arrested by our vessel, stops to play about the moving island, shows us his glittering form, and perhaps tempted by a rag dangling from a hook, falls a victim to his blind rapacity; and porpoises, round-bodied, black, and whale-like in form and nature, come bounding and leaping almost with the regularity of a battalion of cavalry in ranks of four or six, now curving so as just to show their backs, and now springing from the water into the air. These poor creatures, too, fall victims to the hand of man. Our captain twice harpooned a porpoise, and gave us the privilege of tasting fresh steaks at sea. The flesh is red, (for the porpoise is a