possibly bring the clan into grave trouble did it venture to take up my cause, a most unlikely thing, for a man of the Kitchen-middens did not often fight for love when the love was not his own. We were yet too near the ways of brutes for that. I need not have been troubled, for the time, at least. The whole village was in a turmoil as we issued from the forest; there was much running and shouting, many boats were on the water, and all excitement was centred upon a huge, dark object which lay among the reefs not a great way from shore and directly in front of the line of huts. I recognized what it was on the moment. It was a great whale stranded, a rare event and a glorious one for the people of the clan. I caught one of the men by the arm and made him tell me how it had come. A little before noon the people on the beach and those fishing had noted a great commotion of the water quite a distance out at sea, and could not understand it until the foaming and splashing came nearer, for it was approaching the shore rapidly. Then they who had seen the happening often, though never so near the village, recognized what it all meant. A big whale was being attacked by the only enemies he feared in all the ocean, the giant swordfish and the sea fox, as we called it, the thresher, which, with its enormously lengthened body thrown in air, could deliver a blow to crush frightfully into the body of even such a monster as a whale. The attack--for it was no conflict--was a dreadful one, and the victim, in his agony and fear, was heading recklessly and unknowingly directly for the shore. The tide was high, there was a big sea on and, in his senseless and desperate rush, the leviathan came in, on and through the body of a high wave, topped the outer reefs and rocks and pitched floundering among the jagged uprearing mass of rock, a vast prisoner who could not possibly escape. His savage assailants swam up and down outside the reef for a time, as if unwilling to give up their prey, and then took to the deep again, while the whale, deeply wounded, lay gasping where he had been cast until the tide went down, and died there in the shallow water, scarce a hundred yards from land.