The Dolphin 345 



and for fifteen minutes I did not gain thirty feet 

 on this glorious fish, and I never would have 

 caught it on my light tackle had not hard luck, 

 the very hardest, fallen to the lot of this beautiful 

 " offspring of the rainbow." I fought it, played it, 

 turned it, but seemed incapable with my rod and 

 line to bring it in ; and finally, in one of its 

 rushes in a circle, it dashed into a particularly 

 dense mass of gulfweed, and with the line so 

 completely involved itself that I took it with 

 ease the most bare-faced act of piracy ever 

 perpetrated in this latitude, I dare say. 



When I approached, stopping now and then 

 to reel in the slack, the dolphin was lying flat 

 upon its side almost entirely out of water, its 

 efforts and struggles forcing it further out on 

 the thick mat of weed. How shall I describe 

 its wonders, its flashes of color, gorgeous changes 

 from tint to shade, its dazzling effulgence ? I 

 have never seen anything to compare with it in 

 suddenness of unexpected beauties, unless I ex- 

 cept a large squid which I once kept in confine- 

 ment alive for an hour, over whose surface color 

 changes in all the tints of red passed with such 

 rapidity that it could only be compared to heat 

 lightning, which I have observed in the tropics 



