can guess where our milk and port-wine come from.) Poor cod! If of a
certain social standing, it's odds if we will recognize any of him but
his head and shoulders. I have seen him served up in country inns with a
pickled walnut in the socket of each eye; and in life, and at home, he
has the attentive, inquisitive, watchful, humorous eyes common to all
fishes.

Fishes remind me rather of Chinese, who are also a cold-blooded race:
slow, watchful, inquisitive, acquisitive, and full of the sense of
humour. There are fishes in the Great Aquarium whose faces twinkle again
with quiet fun.

The cod here seemed quite as much interested in looking at us through a
glass window as we were in looking at them. They are tame, and have
very large appetites--so tame, and so hungry, that the fish who live
with them are at a disadvantage at meal-times, and it is feared that
they must be removed.

These other fish are plaice, soles, brill, turbot, and skate. The skate
love to lie buried over head and ears in the sand. The faintest outline
of tail or a flapping fin betrays the spot, and you long for an
umbrella-poke from some Zoological-Garden-frequenting old lady, to stir
the lazy creature up; but it is impossible.

Suddenly, when you are as tired of waiting as Jack was when Coomara was
"engaged thinking," the fin movement becomes more distinct, a cloud of
sand rises into the water, and a grey-coated skate, with two ornamental
knobs upon his tail, flaps slowly away across the pool.

Sometimes these flat-fish flap upwards to the surface, poke their noses
into the other world, and then, like larks, having gone up with effort,
let themselves easily down again to the ground.

As we were looking into No. 7, an ambitious little sole took into his
head to climb up the rocks, in the caves of which dwell crusty crabs. By
marvellously agile doubles of his flat little body, he scrambled a good
way up. Then he fell, and two or three valiant efforts still proving
vain, he gave it up.

"He's turned giddy!" shouted a man beside us, who, like every one else,
was watching the sea-gentlemen with rapt interest.

Why the little sole tried rock climbing I don't know, and I doubt if he
knew himself.

Tank 7 is full of Basse--glittering fish who keep their silver armour
clean by scrubbing it among the stones. Like other prettily-dressed
people, they look out of the window all along.

At Tanks 1, 2, and 3, your chief feelings will be curiosity and