n the monsters
passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most deep-sea
organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating, five fathoms
deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the blackness of the
water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep, rolling over and over,
and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the south-east.

These people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one boat
drew alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet of eight
or nine boats collected together, and from them a tumult, like the chatter
of a market-place, rose into the stillness of the night. There was little
or no disposition to pursue the shoal, the people had neither weapons nor
experience for such a dubious chase, and presently--even with a certain
relief, it may be--the boats turned shoreward.

And now to tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole
astonishing raid. We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent
movements of the shoal, although the whole south-west coast was now alert
for it. But it may, perhaps, be significant that a cachalot was stranded
off Sark on June 3. Two weeks and three days after this Sidmouth affair, a
living _Haploteuthis_ came ashore on Calais sands. It was alive,
because several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a convulsive way.
But it is probable that it was dying. A gentleman named Pouchet obtained a
rifle and shot it.

That was the last appearance of a living _Haploteuthis_. No others
were seen on the French coast. On the 15th of June a dead carcass, almost
complete, was washed ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat from
the Marine Biological station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth, picked up
a rotting specimen, slashed deeply with a cutlass wound. How the former
had come by its death it is impossible to say. And on the last day of
June, Mr. Egbert Caine, an artist, bathing near Newlyn, threw up his arms,
shrieked, and was drawn under. A friend bathing with him made no attempt
to save him, but swam at once for the shore. This is the last fact to tell
of this extraordinary raid from the deeper sea. Whether it is really the
last of these horrible creatures it is, as yet, premature to say. But it
is believed, and certainly it is to be hoped, that they have returned now,
and returned for good, to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of
which they have so strangely and so mysteriously ari