r in the exhibition of humor had surely never heard
a mocking-bird sing, watched a roguish crow or admired a school of
fish.

This keen appreciation of a kindred life in the sea has thrown its
charm over the poetry and religion of all races. Ocean us leaves the
o'erarching floods and rocky grottoes at the call of bound Prometheus;
Cyrene, with her nymphs, sits in the cool Peneus, where comes
Aristaeus mourning for his stolen bees; the Druid washed his
hedge-hyssop in the sacred water, and priestesses lived on coral reefs
visited by remote lovers in their sundown seas; Schiller's diver
goes into the purpling deep and sees the Sea-Horror reaching out its
hundred arms; the beautiful Undine is the vivid poetry of the sea.
Every fountain has its guardian saint or nymph, and to this day not
only the German peasant and benighted English boor thrill at the sight
of some nymph-guarded well, but the New Mexican Indian offers his rude
pottery in propitiation of the animate existence, the deity of the
purling spring.

* * * * *

"Der Taucher," for all the rhythm and music that clothes his luckless
plunge, was but a caitiff knight to some of our submarine adventurers.
A diver during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor had reason to apprehend
a more desperate encounter. A huge cuttle-fish, the marine monster of
Pliny and Victor Hugo, had been seen in the water. His tough,
sinuous, spidery arms, five fathoms long, wavered visibly in the blue
transparent gulf,

Und schaudernd dacht ich's--da kroch's heran,
Regte hundert Gelenke zugleich,
Will schnappen nach mir.

A harpoon was driven into the leathery, pulpy body of the monster, but
with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like
thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps
in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was
murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see
nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released.
Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was
wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such power the
monster of the sea, the devil-fish. He returned anxious, doubtful, but
resolute. Few like to be driven from a duty by brute force. He armed
himself, and descended to renew the hazardous encounter in the gloomy
solitude of the sea-bottom. I would I had the wit to describe that
tournament beneath the sea; the s