Half a dozen times, as it swooped overhead, Jerry leaped for it, mouth open to grip, lips writhed clear of the clean puppy teeth that shone in the sun like gems of ivory.
Failing in every leap, Jerry achieved a judgment.

In passing, it must be noted that this judgment was only arrived at by a definite act of reasoning.

Out of a series of observations of the thing, in which it had threatened, always in the same way, a series of attacks, he had found that it had not hurt him nor come in contact with him at all.
Therefore--although he did not stop to think that he was thinking--it was not the dangerous, destroying thing he had first deemed it.

It might be well to be wary of it, though already it had taken its place in his classification of things that appeared terrible but were not terrible.
Thus, he had learned not to fear the roar of the wind among the palms when he lay snug on the plantation-house veranda, nor the onslaught of the waves, hissing and rumbling into harmless foam on the beach at his feet.
Many times, in the course of the day, alertly and nonchalantly, almost with a quizzical knowingness, Jerry cocked his head at the mainsail when it made sudden swooping movements or slacked and tautened its crashing sheet-gear.

But he no longer crouched to spring for it.