We will go and look at it after breakfast, and then you shall see with your own eyes one of the wonders which I have been telling you of.
And what is that shining between the trees?
Water.
Is it a lake?
Not a lake, though there are plenty round here; that is salt water, not fresh.

Look away to the right, and you see it through the opening of the woods again and again: and now look above the woods.

You see a faint blue line, and gray and purple lumps like clouds, which rest upon it far away.

That, child, is the great Atlantic Ocean, and those are islands in the far west.

The water which washes the bottom of the lawn was but a few months ago pouring out of the Gulf of Mexico, between the Bahamas and Florida, and swept away here as the great ocean river of warm water which we call the Gulf Stream, bringing with it out of the open ocean the shoals of mackerel, and the porpoises and whales which feed upon them.
Some fine afternoon we will run down the bay and catch strange fishes, such as you never saw before, and very likely see a living whale.
What?
such a whale as they get whalebone from, and which eats sea-moths?
No, they live far north, in the Arctic circle; these are grampuses, and bottle-noses, which feed on fish; not so big as the right whales, but quite big enough to astonish you, if one comes up and blows close to the boat.