passed so near us, that I think I could have touched it with an oar, and we saw distinctly its small, dull eye, and the loose, wrinkled, folds of skin, about its tremendous jaws. For a minute afterwards, the boat rolled dangerously in the swell caused by the swift passage of so vast an object. Suddenly, after one of these abrupt turns, the monster headed directly towards us, and came rushing onward with fearful velocity, either not noticing us at all, or else mistaking the boat for some sea-creature, with which it designed to measure its strength. There was no time for any effort to avoid the danger; and even had there been, we were too much paralysed by its imminence, to make such an effort. The whale was scarcely twelve yards off--certainly not twenty. Behind it stretched a foaming wake, straight as an arrow. Its vast mountainous head ploughed up the waves like a ship's cutwater, piling high the foam and spray before it. To miss us was now a sheer impossibility and no earthly power could arrest the creature's career. Instant destruction appeared inevitable. I grew dizzy, and my head began to swim, while the thought flashed confusedly through my mind, that infinite wisdom had decreed that we must die, and this manner of perishing had been chosen in mercy, to spare us the prolonged horrors of starvation. What a multitude of incoherent thoughts and recollections crowded upon my mind in that moment of time! A thousand little incidents of my past life, disconnected and trivial--a shadowy throng of familiar scenes and faces, surged up before me, vividly as objects revealed for an instant by the glare of the lightning, in the gloom of a stormy night. Closing my eyes, I silently commended my soul to God, and was endeavouring to compose myself for the dreadful event when Morton sprang to his feet, and called hurriedly upon us to shout together. All seemed to catch his intention at once, and to perceive in it a gleam of hope; and standing up we raised our voices in a hoarse cry, that sounded strange and startling even to ourselves. Instantly, as it seemed, the whale drove almost perpendicularly downwards, but so great was its momentum, that its fluked tail cut the air within an oar's length of the boat as it disappeared. Whether the shout we had uttered, caused the sudden plunge to which we owed our preservation, it is impossible to decide. Notwithstanding its bulk and power, the cachelot is said to be a timid creature, except when injured or enraged, and great caution has to be exercised by whalers in approaching them. Suddenly recollecting this, the thought of undertaking to scare the formidable monster, had suggested itself to Morton, and he had acted upon it in sheer desperation, impelled by the same instinct that causes a drowning man to catch even at a straw.