CHAPTER XXI 



THE UNNATURAL FATE OF THE 

 JELLYFISH 



HERE are those who like a dash of imagination 

 in their records of the forests and the seas, and 

 to whom that which cannot possibly be true ap- 

 peals with more force than the prosaic actual. 

 We wish to please all tastes, and to such as these we may 

 commend the following tale, older than any other of those of 

 the ** Haunted Silences," and authenticated by the best of 

 affidavits. By such affidavits, for example, we are able to 

 prove on unquestionable authority, of clergymen, naturalists 

 and real estate agents, that a jellyfish, seen off Newport in 

 1907, had not a bone in his body, that a monkey taken on the 

 Monkey Island in Matsushima Bay in 1905 had his liver in, 

 and that the only remark of the crow on the turret was 

 caw-caw. Furthermore, an antiquarian reports that an 

 ancient scepter or truncheon supposed to belong to a King 

 of Yvetot had one side pressed or indented, as though it 

 had been used in pounding beef. 

 Here is the story: 



It was the King of the Weirds, and he sat in a tower of 

 his castle by the sea. And all around him on the walls the 

 Weirds stood and wept, and on the tallest turret the Black 

 Crow sat and said, " Caw, caw, caw ! " The castle stood by 

 the shore of the sea, and the King looked far over the waves 

 to the Monkey's Island. And the Prince of the Weirds, the 

 King's little boy, lay in his trundle-bed by the throne, and 

 moaned and groaned persistently, for the Prince was very 



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