FLOUNDERS ARE WONDERFUL 



waited hopefully but nothing happened, and I 

 feared my fish had gone forever. Bending my head 

 as far back as I dared I caught sight of my own 

 stream of breath bubbles and through the mass of 

 silvery — can I call them drops of air — swam the 

 oval flounder, looking from beneath as white as the 

 bubbles themselves. I could not long hold my posi- 

 tion and twisted back, and within three seconds the 

 fish appeared directly in front, and came to the 

 gentlest of landings before my eyes. 



Even if I had been in the upper air where ears 

 are ears, and armed with a microphone, I doubt if 

 it would have recorded the grating of one sand 

 grain upon another — with such infinite softness 

 did the flying carpet at last come to rest. When 

 within an inch or two of the ocean's floor, with sail 

 and fringe-like oars it put on silent brakes, lost im- 

 petus and, as a shadow halts, it settled in a little 

 over its own length. Simultaneously the dark cloak 

 — the dusky pattern deserving of some mysterious 

 Persian room, close latticed against the sun — in 

 the twinkling of an eye was absorbed into thin 

 water, and replaced by a fairy-like tan and white 

 lacery; and that went, and there was in its place 

 nothing but sand, and the flounder had become a 

 figment of my imagination^ — it was as if it never 

 had been. The mast, sail and periscopes had been 

 stowed, the fringe was gone — I was looking not 

 at a peacock flounder, not at an eight-inch Plato- 

 phrys lunatus, but at a smooth extent of sand. 



One of the exciting things about the development 



101 



