‘Oh, captain,’ said I, ‘I’ve been a sailor in my day and of course know how to obey orders. But I’ve cruised a good deal in my time in John Sharkee’s waters, and with all due deference to you I must say that whenever there are sharks about one or more will be showing.’ ‘Sorry to contradict ye, sir, but my answer’s no to that,’ he replied. ‘Tell ’ee what I’ll do, sir--there’s nothen resembling a shark hanging round now, is there?’ We both stared carefully over the water, and I said no. ‘Well, now, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ll bet ’ee a farden’s worth of silver spoons that I’ll call up a shark to anything I may choose to chuck overboard.’ ‘Make it a pennyworth of silver spoons,’ said I, ‘and I’ll bet.’ ‘Done,’ said he with a grin, and straightway walked forward. After a little he returned with a canvas-bag stuffed full of rubbish, potato-parings, yarns, shavings enough to make it floatable, and the like. He hitched the end of a leadline to it, jumped on to the taffrail clear of the awning, and whirling it three or four times, sent it speeding some distance away on the quarter. It fell with a splash, and the blur it made upon the flawless surface was for all the world like the impress of a damp finger upon a sheet of looking-glass. He towed it gently, and scarce had he drawn in three fathoms of the line when a little distance past the bag up shot the fin of a shark with a gleam off its black wetness as though it were a beer-bottle. He hauled the bag aboard and the fin disappeared. ‘Are they to be egg-spoons or dessert-spoons, Finn?’ said I, laughing. ‘By George, I shouldn’t have believed it, though. But it’s always so. Let a man fancy that he knows anything to the very top of it, and he’s sure to fall in with somebody who has a trick above him.’ But it was too hot for shark-fishing, let alone the mess of a capture on our ivory-white planks. At first I was for decoying the beasts to the surface and letting fly at them with one of the muskets below, but Finn suggested that the firing might irritate Sir Wilfrid. What was to be done but lie down and pant? Miss Laura was so overcome by the heat that for once she proved bad company. At lunch she could not eat; she was too languid to talk. ‘Just the afternoon for a game of draughts,’ said I, in playful allusion to the want of air. She waved away the suggestion with a weak movement. In fact she was so oppressed that when I told her about Wilfrid’s new phase of growth she could only look at me dully as though all capacity of emotion lay swooning in her heart. I sat by her side fanning her, whilst the perspiration hopped from my forehead like parched peas. ‘Oh,’ cried the little creature, ‘how long is this calm going to last? What would I give for an English Christmas day to tumble down out of the sky upon us, with its snow and hail.’ ‘Let us go on deck,’ said I; ‘I am certain it is cooler up there.’