"The writers and cadets were in high feather at knowing they were in the same latitude as India, and appeared in all sorts of straw hats, white trousers, and white jackets. Ford had left off talking of going aloft for awhile, to flourish about his swimming--when he looked over with the surgeon into the smooth of a hollow, and saw something big and green, like an immense cucumber, floating along within a fathom or two of the ship, deep down in the blue water. While the griffin asked what it was, a little ripple broke above, a wet black horn came right out of it, and two fiendish round eyes glared up at us ahead of it, as we leant over the quarter, set wide in a broad black snout, shaped like a gravedigger's shovel; then it sank away into the next wave. Ford shivered, in spite of the heat. 'The devil?' inquired one of the writers, coolly, to the surgeon. 'Not just him,' said the Scotchman; 'it's only the first _shark_!' "The young ladies, in their white dresses, now made you think of angels gliding about: as to the only one I had an eye for, by this time it wasn't of not seeing her often enough I had to complain, as she seemed to delight in nothing else but being somewhere or other upon deck, first one part of the ship, then another, as if to see how different the look-out could be made, or to watch something in the waves or the horizon. Instead of sitting with a needle or a book, like the rest, with the corner of one eye toward the gentlemen, or talking and giggling away at no allowance, she would be noticing a man aloft as if she were there herself, or trying to see past a sail, as if she fancied there was something strange on the other side of it. The rest of the girls appeared shy of her at first, no doubt on account of the judge's separate quarters and his grandee style; next, they made acquaintance, she speaking and smiling just as if she had known them before; then again most of them seemingly got jealous because the cadets squinted after her, while old Rollock said Miss Hyde would be the beauty on Chowringee Course, and the first officer was eternally pointing out things to her, like a showman at a fair.