212 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



the boiling mass, took toll, and returned to the 

 pace-making bow race. 



Ten minutes more passed and a Pyrosoma 

 drifted by — a great, pink, hollow, cylindrical 

 colony of unfortunates who had just missed being 

 vertebrates like the tunny and ourselves. Beneath 

 this cylinder of jelly was a half-dozen pilot fish. 

 For some reason — and this is the crux of the whole 

 matter — so long as they crowded beneath it, no 

 tunny paid any attention to them, although so far 

 as actual concealment went, they might just as 

 well have been hiding beneath mosquito netting or 

 a Greek peristyle. As our bow approached their 

 living roof they became panic stricken. All six 

 little fish dashed out, and as if moved by the same 

 mechanism, six tunnies gave six snaps in the very 

 foam of the bow wave, and six little pilot fish were 

 relieved from further worry about their destiny. 

 It cannot be that the tunny fish do not see their 

 ambushed prey, but as a cat will often wait until 

 a mouse makes some movement before it springs, 

 so there may be some instinctive, hair-trigger, 

 piscine law, of vital moment to them, but which in 

 our own case we would similize with the sporting 

 chance of a wing shot. 



I came to have the feeling that far down beyond 

 where my eyes could penetrate were uncounted 

 hosts of little eyes peering upward, waiting for 

 the revealing sunlight to lessen, as animals and 

 flowers appear along the edge of retreating snow, 

 following it, occupying every bare piece of ground. 

 The cook would throw over an empty tin can, and 



