SIXTH ENTRY. 

 STRANGE FISH. 



EVER doubt there axe very strange fish in the sea ; 

 stranger than any of which we have at present 

 heard, read, or imagined. Allowing a wide margin — 

 not a dot less than 50 per cent. — for travellers' tales, this is a 

 conclusion forced upon a thoughtful observer thrown into the 

 society of persons who live on the ocean. Whatever we may • 

 be provoked into saying in our haste, it is not true that all 

 men are liars, and I have heard sufficient of late to lead me 

 to believe that the extraordinary stories of what is hidden in 

 the depths of the sea, in the quiet fathomless hollows never 

 disturbed by the storms that agitate the upper world, are not 

 so strange as might be told upon a plain statement of facts. 

 Of beasts and birds there is probably known as much as it is 

 possible to gather, but he would be a bold man who would 

 say the same of fishes. When it was gravely stated (and I 

 have just heard the full narrative, so called) that a stout 

 ship was within the past three years pulled over and under 

 by some many-armed devourer in the Indian Ocean, seamen 

 wink and laugh ; yet if you ask them whether they actually 



