wary beast. Had this sickly squid been in its full 

 faculties, even my carefully executed approach 

 could not have contrived to corner it. The nearer 

 I drew, the more obvious it became that my caution 

 was needless; the squid by this time was half- 

 turned on its side; drawn by the current in the 

 deeper channel, it was drifting slowly away from 

 the mussels, its posture and its appearance bear- 

 ing the unmistakable stamp of death. As it was, 

 I had merely to seize it around the body and lift 

 it out. 



Yet vitality was not entirely extinct; for as soon 

 as the squid was in the air, I heard a soft convul- 

 sive soughing and felt a few contractions of the 

 mantle as it made its final gasps, so to speak, for a 

 sustaining breath of life. Whereupon I replaced it 

 in the water. It sank at once to the bottom — now 

 irretrievably dead — an ascending column of mul- 

 titudinous silvery bubbles coming from the rap- 

 idly-filling mantle-cavity, bursting at the sunlit 

 surface like the tiny explosions of an effervescing 

 wine. 



The brief inspection I was able to make while 

 it was in my hands, revealed that its two longer 

 tentacular arms were missing; they had been torn 



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