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APPENDIX. 



A SEA-DREAM. 



I HAD to go on business the other evening, after the regular hours, to 

 the Fisheries Exhibition. The public, duly informed by placards that 

 " the Exhibition will close to-day at seven o'clock," had already ebbed 

 out of the buildings, and, trickling away by a thousand rills, had dis- 

 appeared into its hidden springs in the suburbs. The buffets were 

 desolate and the sections a waste. Here and there a care-taker, with 

 a scarlet badge upon his forehead, flitted through the gathering gloom, 

 tapping and tinkering at the woodwork like some human woodpecker. 

 Here and there an " executive," like some black-beetle creature of the 

 twilight, hurried across the silent sections, his arms laden with papers. 

 Occasional lamps threw a spot here and there into sudden reliefs of 

 light and shade, but between them stretched long dim spaces of 

 twilight, an eerie sort of gloaming in which all the exhibits conspired 

 together to look mysterious. The stands of the boats had disap- 

 peared from view, and yawl and smack and canoe seemed veritably 

 afloat. A doorway opened somewhere, and the draught made the 

 fishing nets hanging overhead wave and wobble, and in the deep-sea 

 gloom that surrounded me I almost began to fear that perhaps some 

 mistake had occurred ; that I was really and truly at the bottom of 

 the sea ; when lo ! turning round a rock, I found myself suddenly face 

 to face with a gigantic specimen of the thresher shark. Turning to 

 retreat, I found a bottle-nosed whale barring the doorway, while some 

 fathom and a half above me a Japanese spider-crab, with all its legs 

 outstretched, was hideously floating down through the dim space upon 

 my hat. 



I sped on, narrowly escaping collision with a great white whale that 

 lay glimmering under the shadow of the rock-wall and passing directly 

 under an enormous ribbon-fish — a slab-sided ghost of misery — that 

 happened to be crossing overhead. But in a few steps more I was 

 safe, and sitting down, regardless of spat, on an oyster-bed, I looked 

 back into the ocean cave from which I had just escaped. (Poets, I 

 observe, always do this, as it gives them an opportunity of describing 



