194 THE OCTOPUS. 
comparable to the many-oared caique that glides 
over the tranquil waters of the Bosporus; they 
can ramble at will over the sandy roadways in- 
tersecting their submarine parks, and, converting 
arms into legs, march on like a huge spider. 
Gymnasts of the highest order, they climb the 
slippery ledges, as flies walk up a window- 
pane; attaching the countless suckers that arm 
the terrible limbs to the face of the rocks, or 
to the wrack and seaweed, they go about, back 
downward, like marine sloths, or, clinging with 
one arm to the waving algee, perform ceries of 
trapeze movements that Ledtard might view 
with envy. 
The size, of course, varies. I have seen and 
measured the arm five feet long, and as large at 
the base where it joins the central disc as my 
wrist; and were an octopus by any chance to 
wind its sucker-dotted cable-arms round a luck- 
less bather, fatal would be the embrace, and 
horrible to imagine, being dragged down and 
drowned by this eight-armed monster; a worse 
death than being crushed by coiling serpents like 
ill-fated Laocoon. 
I have often when on the rocks, in Esquimalt 
Harbour, watched my friend’s proceedings; the 
water being clear and still, it is just like peering 
