The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-02-26
"Soundless and lcolorless water that
 knows not the sense of the sun"

In this emergency the plan adopted
 three hundred years ago was, Lasagra
 tells us, to place line of blacks
 crawling on all four, as beaters along
 each bank of the cheek. At given signal, the niggers sprang up in a body,
 waved their arms frantically and yelled to corerspon. As the manatee is either too stupid or too lazy to move in any other direction than that which he faces, he was inevitably netted, shot or speared
 For us there is too much of the ,"drive' about this. Moreover, he of the
 creek is but one of a family. Out on
 to the bosom of the river shoot our
 boats. The ripples, quivering under a
 dancing haze of heat, flash back the
 light like mirrors, So that, while the
 colored boatman softly rows the white
 sportsman, standing spear and glass in hand at the brow, is fain to refresh
 his eyes for moment or two with the cool olive of the forest wall on either
 bank ere he turn them again on the glittering bit of water which each boat is beating as noiselessly as possible. Never Is silence more golden than dur ing sea lion hunt, for, if second manatee has been browsing in the deep- CT reaches, at the faintest echo of p,lr- suit he floats, the body, arched and the rounded chestnut t-colored back suffi- ciently under the surface to be unob- servable until close upon the creature whose lungs obviously act in the same manner as the air sack of fishes. The instant In which he catches a glimpse of that red brown hump barely two feet under the clear surface is the psy- chological moment for the manatee hunter. The rope has been unloosed, ready; the harpoon speeds through the sunlit air and water; there is con- vulsive writing and pulling and jerk ing; the negro boatman is on his knees in the boat, steadying the tiny craft with hands and feet wide apart; the nervous fingers of the sportsman are reeling in the rope, or the game has dived, just in time for the harpoon to miss it's mark by one second
 Not a hint, not suspicion, of its whereabouts for a good hour, for while the manatee does not stay under water for more than from five to eight minutes at a time, it seems able, when diversity and persecution | overtake it, to remain beneath the sur face for something like twenty min- utes. At last, over a mile upstream, a bubble rises in pool near the left | bank. From the bubble circles girdle | and double and treble themselves, until | their outer rings touch the drowsy edge of the river. Steathily the boat | slides nearer and nearer. Whether from inertia, or from the en- enect upon it of the now much [ warmer current, the game Is as if dor nant, floating, lymphatic, under the lnstirred blossoms of some water waifs # the lotus genus. The we'll known. for hump curves itself seemingly molten now, against the iercer gold that furrows the water. In he boat the oars are resting in the row. ocks; there is another lunge-silent. wilt, and this time sure--of the har- 'oon. Then, the race for the shore, he rattle of the reeling in, and the tri- imphal landing of the game, amid the latter and chatter of the negroes, whose award is the spoil, the oil of