and saintly souls with an itch for impossible per- 

 fection, but normal human beings. 



Well, so resulted my long relations with Loligo. 

 Its personality, like that of humans, needed only 

 to be understood to be appreciated. To-day I look 

 upon it in quite another light. Even its outward 

 appearance has lost the sinister and ghastly aspect 

 which first I found to be the most effective of its 

 several forbidding features. No longer am I sub- 

 consciously constrained to compare its coral white- 

 ness with the color of a corpse : in the place of a 

 once-seeming pallor of death now prevails an 

 opaline hue, softly iridescent, alluring, of ghostly, 

 gleaming nacre ... In brief, a growing famili- 

 arity has led me to regard it with feelings of 

 genuine good-will. 



With its mystery removed, almost any creature 

 is bound to appear in a more friendly and favor- 

 able light. As it is in this light that I should like 

 to have Loligo remain in the mind of the reader, 

 I shall proceed at this point briefly to consider 

 certain of its physical features ; a proceeding which 

 will dissipate much of its strangeness at the start. 

 But for the sake of conciseness, my method of do- 



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