We was off the Banks, and the time of year was July, and
the ice was coming down, and we got in among a lot of it. Not
far away, off our weather bow, there was a little iceberg which
had such a queerness about it that the captain and three men went
in a boat to look at it. The ice was mighty clear ice, and you
could see almost through it, and right inside of it, not more
than three feet above the waterline, and about two feet, or maybe
twenty inches, inside the ice, was a whopping big shark, about
fourteen feet long,--a regular man-eater,--frozen in there hard
and fast. `Bless my soul,' said the captain, `this is a
wonderful curiosity, and I'm going to git him out.' Just then
one of the men said he saw that shark wink, but the captain
wouldn't believe him, for he said that shark was frozen stiff and
hard and couldn't wink. You see, the captain had his own idees
about things, and he knew that whales was warm-blooded and would
freeze if they was shut up in ice, but he forgot that sharks was
not whales and that they're cold-blooded just like toads. And
there is toads that has been shut up in rocks for thousands of
years, and they stayed alive, no matter how cold the place was,
because they was cold-blooded, and when the rocks was split, out
hopped the frog. But, as I said before, the captain forgot
sharks was cold-blooded, and he determined to git that one
out.
"Now you both know, being housekeepers, that if you take a
needle and drive it into a hunk of ice you can split it.
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