THE NAUTILUS. 
87 
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 
familiar objects. A shoal of little fish passed us, swimming under 
our arms and between our legs in the most ridiculous 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 handed 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 travelled east or west, ten yards or a hundred, 
in ten minutes or half an hour. A queer sensation was that of hav¬ 
ing 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 with 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 some¬ 
thing off a broad frond, and handed it to me. It was a Doris, a 
lovely creature, whose like 1 never saw in books, striped with purple 
on a milk-white ground. It began to crawl over my fingers 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 corre¬ 
spondent above had filled the bottle with water, the pressure at our 
depth so sealed it that we could not raise the stopper. With a mes¬ 
sage on the slate, “ Open this bottle and send it down open,” we 
sent the jar aloft. When is was lowered to us the second time, I 
found that my Doris had slipped unobserved through my fingers, 
and so I lost a possible new species, the rarest treasure I was to see 
that day. 
