AN EXPEESSIVE COUNTENANCE. 221 



hold of your leg, it will cut through it, sinew, muscle, and 

 bone ; the stoutest man on board would be swept down 

 if he came within the reach of that violent tail. What 

 reverberating blows it inflicts on the smooth planks ! 



One cannot look at that face without an involuntary 

 shudder. The long flat head, and the mouth so greatly 

 overhung by the snout, impart a most repulsive expres- 

 sion to the countenance ; and then the teeth, those 

 terrible serried fangs, as keen as lancets, and yet cut 

 into fine notches like saws, lying row behind row, row 

 behind row, six rows deep! See how the front rows 

 start up into erect stiffness, as the creature eyes you! 

 You shrink back from the terrific implement, no longer 

 wondering that the stoutest limb of man should be 

 severed in a moment by such chirurgery. But the eyes ! 

 those horrid eyes! it is the eyes that make the shark's 

 countenance what it is the very embodiment of Satanic 

 malignity. Half-concealed beneath the bony brow, the 

 little green eye gleams with so peculiar an expression of 

 hatred, such a concentration of fiendish malice, of quiet, 

 calm, settled villany, that no other countenance that I 

 have ever seen at all resembles. Though I have seen 

 many a shark, I could never look at that eye without 

 feeling my flesh creep, as it were, on my bones. 



How eerie (to use an expressive northern term, for 

 which we have no equivalent) must be the scene pre- 

 sented to a few forlorn mariners committed to an open 

 boat in the midst of the broad southern sea, a thousand 

 miles from land, when by night these obscene monsters 



