78 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



made him absurdly like a prize bull. He was dull 

 scarlet with splashes of golden brown along his 

 sides, which was well enough, but a bull does not 

 have tatters and fringes of blue and yellow scat- 

 tered all over him (unless we choose to consider the 

 cruel banderillos as ornamental). My blenny's 

 eyes were silver with hieroglyphics of purple in 

 them, and as I looked, he puffed a puff of water 

 at my window and was gone. 



I was quite reoriented now. The hardest thing 

 was to realize that I was wet. It was the old storv 

 of the value of comparison. All of me was wet 

 and I could not reach up into dry air, so I had no 

 sensation of wetness. I looked at my fingers, how- 

 ever, and saw the beginning of washerwoman's 

 wrinkles, so was convinced! I reached out aiid 

 picked a starfish from the rock in front, and as it 

 slowly crawled over my hand, I realized to the full 

 that this was a wild starfish and not one brought 

 from somewhere else and placed there for me to 

 look at. 



One handicap, present at every submersion, was 

 the impossibility of writing down notes, except on 

 an awkward slate, the multitude of exciting ex- 

 periences and hosts of remarkable creatures so dis- 

 tracting my attention that my memory was strained 

 to the utmost to recall a clear sequence of events. 

 This I hope to remedy in a made-to-order helmet 

 which shall contain a cheek pouch of sorts, to hold 

 a little writing-paper roll and a pencil, in the dry 

 air of the side of the helmet, at the left of my face. 



It was the morning of April ninth when I went 



