THE MUSEUM. 



47- 



To cure it, I went through the motion 

 of swallowing- once or twice. Feeling 

 more comfortable, I "began to take 

 notice," as they say of the babies. 

 The light was bright enough to see 

 small things plainly twenty feet away, 

 but the water strangely magnified fam- 

 iliar objects. A shoal of little fish 

 passed us, swimming under our arms 

 and between our legs in the most ridic- 

 ulous way. I tried to take one with 

 my hand, but it deftly turned and 

 avoided my grasp. The guide, seeing 

 my attempt, pinned one to the ground 

 with an iron rod he carried, and hand- 

 ed it to me; another he stabbed and 

 caught as it swam by. Before we had 

 gone far I had lost all sense of time, 

 space or direction, and became too 

 confused to know whether I had trav- 

 elled east or west, ten yards or a hun- 

 dred, in ten minutes or half an hour. 

 A queer sensation was that of having 

 escaped from the law of gravity; it 

 seemed just as easy to walk up as 

 down a cliff — we usually walked on 

 our toes, sloping from the ground at 

 an angle of forty to sixty degrees. 

 When too much air is pumped down, 

 the submarine pedestrian is unduly 

 buoyant, and his aims to clutch a shell 

 from the ground must be comically 

 like the dodging and staggering of a 

 drunken man. 



A little dell lay before us choked 

 wdth rank seaweed, through which we 

 strode waist deep like plunging into a 

 tangle of fern in some damp valley on 

 the land. My guide reached out, 

 picked something off a broad frond, 

 and handed it to me. It was a Doris, 

 a lovely creature, whose like I never 

 saw in books, striped with purple on a 

 milk-white ground. It began to crawl 

 over my lingers quite unconcernedly. 



I clapped my hands and tried dumbly 

 to express my delight by patting my- 

 companion's big fist. He replied by 

 offering me the slate, on which I wrote 

 "Very good; put him in the bottle." 

 Rubbing out my words, he wrote, 

 "Send down the bottle," tied the slate 

 to the rope and jerked the latter four 

 times. Away went rope and slate to 

 the regions above. In response to an 

 answering signal the slack was hauled 

 in and my collecting-jar descended tied 

 to the rope. In turn, we tried in vain 

 to open it. Although our correspon- 

 dents above had filled the bottle with 

 water, the pressure at our depth so 

 sealed it that we could not raise the 

 stopper. With a message on the slate, 

 "Open this bottle and send it down 

 open," we sent the jar aloft. When 

 it was lowered to us the second time, I 

 found that my Doris had slipped un- 

 observed through my fingers, and so I 

 lost a possible new species, the rarest 

 treasure I was to see that day. 



Continuing our travels in the dim 

 water-world, we passed through a field 

 of sponges. Not the brow^n, round 

 masses of the bath-room, but radiant 

 growths of scarlet [Raphynis hixoiii 

 and Halicondia rndra)a.nd purple, here 

 and there great open oscula, tempting 

 one to poke in a mischievous finger. 

 Some grew in tufts like moss, some ex- 

 panded like a dainty vase {^Phyllosip- 

 Jionia caliciforiiiis), some forked like 

 branches of trees and some spread like 

 a lady's fan. One abundant species, 

 about the size and shape of an orange, 

 was pure ice-white, studded with gold- 

 en dots that almost glittered (Leucon- 

 dra sp). Of all these we gathered 

 what we could, pricking our hands sore 

 with sponge spicules as we worked. 

 Wlien, on the morrow, our ravished 



