and tossed them aside.
They then speedily transferred their contents in lots to huge wickerwork
trays, arranging them with a turn of the hand so that they might show
to the best advantage. And when the large tray-like baskets were all
set out, Florent could almost fancy that a whole shoal of fish had got
stranded there, still quivering with life, and gleaming with rosy nacre,
scarlet coral, and milky pearl, all the soft, pale, sheeny hues of the
ocean.

The deep-lying forests of seaweed, in which the mysterious life of the
ocean slumbers, seemed at one haul of the nets to have yielded up all
they contained. There were cod, keeling, whiting, flounders, plaice,
dabs, and other sorts of common fish of a dingy grey with whitish
splotches; there were conger-eels, huge serpent-like creatures, with
small black eyes and muddy, bluish skins, so slimy that they still
seemed to be gliding along, yet alive. There were broad flat skate
with pale undersides edged with a soft red, and superb backs bumpy with
vertebrae, and marbled down to the tautly stretched ribs of their
fins with splotches of cinnabar, intersected by streaks of the tint of
Florentine bronze--a dark medley of colour suggestive of the hues of a
toad or some poisonous flower. Then, too, there were hideous dog-fish,
with round heads, widely-gaping mouths like those of Chinese idols, and
short fins like bats' wings; fit monsters to keep yelping guard over the
treasures of the ocean grottoes. And next came the finer fish, displayed
singly on the osier trays; salmon that gleamed like chased silver, every
scale seemingly outlined by a graving-tool on a polished metal surface;
mullet with larger scales and coarser markings; large turbot and huge
brill with firm flesh white like curdled milk; tunny-fish, smooth and
glossy, like bags of blackish leather; and rounded bass, with widely
gaping mouths which a soul too large for the body seemed to have rent
asunder as it forced its way out amidst the stupefaction of death. And
on all sides there were sole, brown and grey, in pairs; sand-eels, slim
and stiff, like shavings of pewter; herrings, slightly twisted, with
bleeding gills showing on their silver-worked skins; fat dories tinged
with just a suspicion of carmine; burnished mackerel with green-streaked
backs, and sides gleaming with ever-changing iridescence; and rosy
gurnets with white bellies, their head towards the centre of the baskets
and their tails radiating all around