"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."
Here again he reconnoitred the bait, and walloped about all round it, as if laughing at us, and saying to himself,--"No go, my boys." He then looked up with a languishing eye at little Dicky Phantom, whom Lennox was now holding on the tafferel. "Ah," again said sharkee to himself, I make no question, "ah, _that's_ the thing I want. What a morsel _that_ would be!" and he made several rushes hither and thither, as one has seen a dog do, before settling down steadily on end, to look up at the morsel an urchin is tantalizing him with.
At length, seeing I was so unaccommodating and inexorable as not even to oblige him with a limb, and that Dicky Phantom was altogether forbidden fruit, he made an angry dart, and vanished below the counter.