146 By Stream and Sea. 



shiny tarpaulin coat which the ordinary visitor would see, 

 he presented a soft jacket of well-furred seal-skin, of a 

 golden brown tint. The keeper tried to rouse him, but he 

 lifted up his shapely head and made the place echo with 

 a cross between a howl and a roar. It was tremendous, 

 and not at all a cheerful noise. The sight of a dead herring 

 induced him at length to come to his keeper, but an attempt 

 to fondle set him snarling and roaring viciously, and in the 

 process he exhibited a formidable set of teeth. Then he 

 went back to his rocky ledge, sulking as before. The 

 lioness, as we must call her, had from the first been gambol- 

 ing merrily in the water, and was evidently in the best 

 of health and spirits. Little, however, is definitely known 

 of these curious members of the seal family. The captives 

 sleep in a snug railed-in enclosure, some distance out of the 

 water, and they huddle together in the straw like a pair 

 of loving children. 



But this is by the way. We are bent upon another visit 

 to our older friends. The first tank in the main thorough- 

 fare of the aquarium is the home of the anemones j and they 

 are a splendid variety. Many of them were taken from the 

 bottom of the Great Eastern by Mr. Henry Lee, who found 

 about three hundred tons of mussels and other mollusca 

 clinging to the big ship. Those cream-white specks upon 

 the interior of the glass are fragments of the anemones' feet : 

 it leaves them in crawling across, and each speck will 

 eventually develop into a full-grown specimen. The ane- 

 mone sometimes runs counter to the wishes of the aquarium 

 managers; they prefer to plant it in the best position for 

 public admiration, and it has a weakness for shrimp-capture. 



The symmetrical bright-hued boar-fish used to be thought 

 the rarest, as it is certainly the most tropical looking, of 

 British fishes ; but it has now been proved to be plentiful on 



