28 PEOSE HAXIETJTICS. 



hot, albeit in coldj water. Haviag found suitable gites 

 for his numerous females, he ascends the waters, and" 

 from a transparent watch-tower looks down into their 

 bowers, an open-eyed sentinel, whose jealousy day and 

 night never remits, not so much as to permit him to 

 taste food. As the time for expecting a new posterity 

 approaches, his anxiety, we are told by his biographer, 

 knows no bounds: — 



He goes from one to the other, and back again to the first, 

 making inquiries of aJl; but as the pains and perils of Lucina 

 proceed, the livehest emotions of feai and anxiety are awakened 

 in his breast. As some distracted matron in attendance upon a 

 daughter during the first throes — ^throes so fearful to the sex — 

 wanders in her agitation backwards and forwards, and suffers by 

 sympathy all the daughter's pains in her own person, refosing 

 comfort till she hears the joyful cry of dehrery, so the agitated 

 cossyphus roams incessantly about, disturbing the waters as he 

 moves from pl3,ce to place. 



The fisherman, tracking these movements, drops a 

 live bait properly leaded right over the thalamus of one 

 of the ladies in. roe; the cossyphus, supposing this an in- 

 vasion of his seraglio, flies at the iatruder open-mouthed, 

 and is immediately hooked — ^his dying moments being 

 further embittered by cruel taunts from the trawler, 

 who, after the insulting manner of Homer's heroes, re- 

 viles him by all his mistresses, and bids him mark the 

 seething caldron on the lighted shore, prepared expressly 

 for his reception. His favourites, on losing their protec- 

 tor, leave their hiding-places; and getting, like other ' un- 

 protected females,' into difficulties, are speedily taken. 



A very singular mode of taking eels is thus described 

 by .^lian:* 



The artful eeler pitches upon a spot favourable for his 

 purpose a,t the turn of a stream, and lets down from where he 

 stands, on the high bank, some cubits' length of the intestines 



* HSerai opxV^' k"' ""SJ, (cat axoucras dmTDjSo ek ttjs BdKitytrqs. 

 — Aristotle, cited by Ath. 



