increases with that of its victim; every struggle produces a tightening of its ligatures. Gilliatt had but one resource, his knife. His left hand only was free; his open knife was in this hand. The antenna of the devilfish cannot be cut; it is a leathery substance, impossible to divide with the knife, it slips under the edge. Its position in attack also is such that to cut it would be to wound the victim's own flesh. The creature is formidable, but there is a way of resisting it. The fishermen of Sark know this, as does any one who has seen them execute certain abrupt movements in the sea. The cephalopod, in fact, is only vulnerable through the head. 18. Gilliatt was not ignorant of this fact. He had never seen a devil-fish of this size: another man would have been powerless with terror. With the octopus, as with a furious bull, there is a certain moment in the conflict which must be seized. It is the instant when the bull lowers the neck; it is the instant when the devil-fish advances its head. The movement is rapid. He who loses that moment is destroyed. 19. The things we have described occupied only a few moments. Gilliatt, however, felt the increasing power of its innumerable suckers. The monster is cunning; it tries first to stupefy its prey,-it seizes, and then pauses awhile. Gilliatt grasped his knife; the sucking increased. He looked at the monster, which seemed to look at him. Suddenly it loosened from the rock its sixth antenna, and, darting it at him, seized him by the left arm. At the same moment it advanced its head with a violent movement. In one second more its mouth would have fastened on his breast. Bleeding in the sides, and with his two arms entangled, he would have been a dead man. 20. But Gilliatt was watchful. He avoided the antenna, and at the moment when the monster darted forward to fasten on his breast, he struck it with the knife clenched in his left hand. There were two convulsions in opposite directions, — that of the devil-fish and that of its prey. The movement was rapid as a double flash of lightning. He had plunged the blade of his knife into the flat, slimy substance, and by a rapid movement, like the flourish of a whip in the air, describing a circle round the two eyes, he wrenched the head off as a man would draw a tooth. 21. The struggle was ended. The folds relaxed; the monster dropped away, like the slow detaching of hands; the four hundred suckers, deprived of their sustaining power, dropped at once from the man and the rock. The mass sank to the bottom of the water. Breathless with the struggle, Gilliatt could perceive upon the stones at his feet two shapeless, slimy heaps; the head on one side, the remainder of the monster on the other. Fearing, nevertheless, some convulsive return of his agony, he recoiled to avoid the reach of the dreaded tentacles. But the monster was quite dead. Gilliatt closed his knife. VICTOR HUGO. THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer-wind its purpled wings And coral reefs lie bare; Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze, no more unfurl : Wrecked is the ship of pearl; And every chambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, Its irised1 ceiling rent, its sunless crypt 2 unsealed! 1 'rised, tinged with rainbow hues. 2 crypt, cell. Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil: Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new; Stole with soft step its shining archway through; Built up its idle door; Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap folorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathéd horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul! As the swift seasons roll; Leave thy low-vaulted past; Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!" 1. IF a boy, a cod-fish, and a crab, were placed in seawater and covered by it, the boy would be drowned, the fish and the crab would be safe. If on the contrary, all were placed on the strand, the fish would die, while the boy and the crab would be uninjured. Hence it appears that the crab can live where the boy cannot live; and that it can also live where the fish would perish. Let us see how this happens. 2. You and I breathe by means of lungs, which are in that part of the body called the chest. Every breath we draw fills the chest with air, and this acts upon the blood in the lungs; this air is driven out of the chest, fresh air is inhaled, and thus the act of breathing goes on. The fish, on the contrary, does not breathe by lungs, but by gills, and they cannot act except when the water is flowing through them. 3. We die if deprived of air; the fish dies if deprived of water in which air is contained, because it is by means of the water that it gets the air necessary for its existence. The breathing organs of the crab are quite different; so long as they are moist the crab can breathe. It has gills, but these do not require a current of water to pass through them, like those of a fish; they are wetted when the tide comes in, and this keeps them moist while the crabs are running on the sand at low-water. 4. When you take a crab in your hand it feels hard, because it is covered with a hard crust or shell. Now, suppose a little crab has got this hard covering over its body, how is it ever to grow any bigger? A snail can add a piece to its shell, and thus make its house larger when it wishes to do so. A mussel or an oyster can also make its shell larger by adding to it; but what is the crab to do? How is it to get out of the shell, if that be needful? and where or how is it to get a larger one? I will tell you |