Taking care not to get within reach of either the jaws or ponderous tail of the shark, he leaned over the side of the ship and stabbed it in the neck; after which, with two long slashing cuts he severed the head, which quickly splashed down into the sea under the counter, sinking to the bottom at once from the mere weight of the bone it contained. Jackson then proceeded, by the captain's orders, to rip open the animal's stomach; but it was found to contain nothing digestible but the piece of pork which had led to the brute's capture, the shark evidently having been lately on short allowance. When, however, Jackson extracted the hook from the bait, he started back suddenly as if he had received a blow, clutching hold of the shrouds to steady himself. I thought he was going to faint. "Hullo!" exclaimed Captain Miles; "what's the matter?" "See here!" replied the young sailor, holding up in his hand something dark and soft looking, with a bit of ribbon fluttering from one end. "Well, what is it?" repeated the captain. "My cap," said Jackson solemnly; "and, but for the mercy of God I also might have been in the same place!" It gave us all a thrill, I can tell you, the sight of this old cap, which must have floated off Jackson's head when he dived to escape the rush of the shark. The brute had swallowed it, no doubt, greedily, thinking it had got the owner. As for Jackson himself, when he clambered up over the side again and came inboard, his face was as white as a table-cloth. I did not hear him, either, joking about the deck all day afterwards in his usual way; although the young sailor, besides being the smartest of the hands at his work, had hitherto been the life of the crew, always laughing and chaffing the others, as well as being the first to lead a song on the fo'c's'le of an evening. The startling discovery of his cap in the shark's stomach, coupled with the reflection that, had not Providence intervened in his behalf, he might have also been swallowed up, seemed to have completely sobered him for the time. The other hands, however, were not much affected by the incident; and, presently, when the bight of the rope round the shark was unloosed and the body allowed to drop overboard, Moggridge sang out in a triumphant voice: "Now we've got rid of Jonah, we'll have a shift of wind at last!" "Why does the boatswain say that?" I asked Captain Miles. "What had the shark to do with the weather?" "Well, you see, my boy," he answered, "sailors are generally superstitious, and they always think that killing a shark brings good luck of some sort. Now, the best sort of luck we can have would be a good stiff south-wester, or something of that sort, to drive us on our way across the Atlantic, as we have experienced nothing but light breezes since we left the islands, barely making five hundred miles' distance from Sombrero. We'll never get to England at this rate in a month of Sundays."