Animals -- Fiction; Children's stories, English; Short stories
But as soon as the Mariner, who was a man of
infinite-resource-and-sagacity, found himself truly inside the Whale’s
warm, dark, inside cup-boards, he stumped and he jumped and he thumped
and he bumped, and he pranced and he danced, and he banged and he
clanged, and he hit and he bit, and he leaped and he creeped, and he
prowled and he howled, and he hopped and he dropped, and he cried and he
sighed, and he crawled and he bawled, and he stepped and he lepped, and
he danced hornpipes where he shouldn’t, and the Whale felt most unhappy
indeed. (_Have_ you forgotten the suspenders?)
So he said to the ‘Stute Fish, ‘This man is very nubbly, and besides he
is making me hiccough. What shall I do?’
‘Tell him to come out,’ said the ‘Stute Fish.
So the Whale called down his own throat to the shipwrecked Mariner,
‘Come out and behave yourself. I’ve got the hiccoughs.’
‘Nay, nay!’ said the Mariner. ‘Not so, but far otherwise. Take me to my
natal-shore and the white-cliffs-of-Albion, and I’ll think about it.’
And he began to dance more than ever.
‘You had better take him home,’ said the ‘Stute Fish to the Whale.
‘I ought to have warned you that he is a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity.’
So the Whale swam and swam and swam, with both flippers and his tail,
as hard as he could for the hiccoughs; and at last he saw the Mariner’s
natal-shore and the white-cliffs-of-Albion, and he rushed half-way
up the beach, and opened his mouth wide and wide and wide, and said,
‘Change here for Winchester, Ashuelot, Nashua, Keene, and stations on
the _Fitch_burg Road;’ and just as he said ‘Fitch’ the Mariner walked
out of his mouth. But while the Whale had been swimming, the Mariner,
who was indeed a person of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, had taken his
jack-knife and cut up the raft into a little square grating all running
criss-cross, and he had tied it firm with his suspenders (_now_, you
know why you were not to forget the suspenders!), and he dragged that
grating good and tight into the Whale’s throat, and there it stuck! Then
he recited the following _Sloka_, which, as you have not heard it, I
will now proceed to relate--
By means of a grating
I have stopped your ating.
For the Mariner he was also an Hi-ber-ni-an. And he stepped out on the
shingle, and went home to his mother, who had given him leave to trail
his toes in the water; and he married and lived happily ever afterward.
So did the Whale. But from that day on, the grating in his throat,
which he could neither cough up nor swallow down, prevented him eating
anything except very, very small fish; and that is the reason why whales
nowadays never eat men or boys or little girls.
The small ‘Stute Fish went and hid himself in the mud under the
Door-sills of the Equator. He was afraid that the Whale might be angry
with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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