When I came to myself I was thrashing about knee-deep in a rocky pool, blinded by the water and half suffocated, while under my feet, like a stranded porpoise, the harbor-master made the water boil in his efforts to upset me. But his limbs seemed soft and boneless; he had no nails, no teeth, and he bounced and thumped and flapped and splashed like a fish, while I rained blows on him with the boat-hook that sounded like blows on a football. And all the while his gills were blowing out and frothing, and purring, and his lidless eyes looked into mine, until, nauseated and trembling, I dragged myself back to the beach, where already the pretty nurse alternately wrung her hands and her petticoats in ornamental despair. Beyond the cove, Halyard was bobbing up and down, afloat in his invalid's chair, trying to steer shoreward. He was the maddest man I ever saw. "Have you killed that rubber-headed thing yet?" he roared. "I can't kill it," I shouted, breathlessly. "I might as well try to kill a football!" "Can't you punch a hole in it?" he bawled. "If I can only get at him--" His words were drowned in a thunderous splashing, a roar of great, broad flippers beating the sea, and I saw the gigantic forms of my two great auks, followed by their chicks, blundering past in a shower of spray, driving headlong out into the ocean. "Oh, Lord!" I said. "I can't stand that," and, for the first time in my life, I fainted peacefully--and appropriately--at the feet of the pretty nurse. * * * * * It is within the range of possibility that this story may be doubted. It doesn't matter; nothing can add to the despair of a man who has lost two great auks. As for Halyard, nothing affects him--except his involuntary sea-bath, and that did him so much good that he writes me from the South that he's going on a walking-tour through Switzerland--if I'll join him. I might have joined him if he had not married the pretty nurse. I wonder whether--But, of course, this is no place for speculation. In regard to the harbor-master, you may believe it or not, as you choose. But if you hear of any great auks being found, kindly throw a table-cloth over their heads and notify the authorities at the new Zoological Gardens in Bronx Park, New York. The reward is ten thousand dollars. VI Before I proceed any further, common decency requires me to reassure my readers concerning my intentions, which, Heaven knows, are far from flippant.