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 
