The hydra harpoons its victim.

This creature applies itself to its prey; covers it, and knots its long bands about it. Underneath, it is yellowish. On top, earth-colored: nothing can represent this inexplicable hue of dust; one would pronounce it a creature made of ashes, living in the water. In form it is spiderlike, and like a chameleon in its coloring. When irritated it becomes violet in hue. Its most terrible quality is its softness.

Its folds strangle; its contact paralyzes.

It

Its

It has an aspect of scurvy and gangrene. It is disease embodied in monstrosity. It is not to be torn away. adheres closely to its prey. How? By a vacuum. eight antennæ, large at the root, gradually taper off and end in needles. Underneath each one of them are arranged two rows of decreasing pustules, the largest near the head, the smallest ones at the tip. Each row consists of twenty-five; there are fifty pustules to each antenna, and the whole creature has four hundred of them. These pustules are cupping glasses.

These cupping glasses are cylindrical, horny, livid cartilages. On the large species they gradually diminish from the diameter of a five-franc piece to the size of a lentil. These fragments of tubes are thrust out from the animal and retire into it. They can be inserted into the prey for more than an inch.

This sucking apparatus has all the delicacy of a keyboard. It rises, then retreats. It obeys the slightest wish of the animal. The most exquisite sensitiveness cannot equal the contractibility of these suckers, always proportioned to the internal movements of the creature

and to the external circumstances. This dragon is like a

sensitive plant.

This is the monster which mariners call the poulp, which science calls the cephalopod, and which legend calls the kraken. English sailors call it the devil fish. They also call it the bloodsucker. In the Channel Islands it is called the pieuvre.

It is very rare in Guernsey, very small in Jersey, very large and quite frequent in Sark.

A print from Sonnini's edition of Buffon represents an octopus crushing a frigate. Denis Montfort thinks that the octopus of the high latitudes is really strong enough to sink a ship. Bory Saint Vincent denies this, but admits that in our latitudes it does attack men. Go to Sark and they will show you, near Brecq-Hon, the hollow in the rock where, a few years ago, an octopus seized and drowned a lobster fisher.

Peron and Lamarck are mistaken when they doubt whether the octopus can swim, since it has no fins.

He who writes these lines has seen, with his own eyes, at Sark, in the cave called the "Shops," an octopus swimming and chasing a bather. When killed and measured, it was found to be four English feet in spread, and four hundred suckers could be counted. The dying monster thrust them out convulsively.

According to Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose strong gift of intuition causes them to descend, or to ascend, even to magianism, the octopus has almost the passions of a man; the octopus hates. In fact, in the absolute, to be hideous is to hate.

The misshapen struggles under a necessity of elimination,

and this, consequently, renders it hostile. The octopus when swimming remains, so to speak, in its sheath. It swims with all its folds held close. Let the reader picture to himself a sewed-up sleeve with a closed fist inside of it. This fist, which is the head, pushes the water, and advances with a vague, undulating movement. Its two eyes, though large, are not very distinct, being the color of the water.

The octopus on the chase, or lying in wait, hides; it contracts, it condenses itself; it reduces itself to the simplest possible expression. It confounds itself with the shadow. It looks like a ripple of the waves.

bles everything except something living.

It resem

The octopus is a hypocrite. When one pays no heed to it, suddenly it opens.

A glutinous mass possessed of a will - what more frightful? Glue filled with hatred.

It is in the most beautiful azure of the limpid water that this hideous, voracious star of the sea arises.

It gives no warning of its approach, which renders it more terrible. Almost always when one sees it, one is already caught.

At night, however, and in breeding season, it is phosphorescent. This terror has its passions. It awaits the nuptial hour. It adorns itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; and from the summit of a rock one can see it beneath, in the shadowy depths, spread out in a pallid irradiation a specter sun.

It is

One can

It has no bones, it has no blood, it has no flesh. flabby. There is nothing in it. It is a skin. turn its eight tentacles wrong side out, like the fingers of a glove.

It has a single orifice in the center of its radiation. Is this one hole the vent? Is it the mouth? It is both.

The same aperture fulfills both functions. The entrance is the exit.

The whole creature is cold.

The carnarius of the Mediterranean is repulsive. An odious contact has this animated gelatine, which envelops the swimmer, into which the hands sink, where the nails scratch, which one rends without killing, and tears off without pulling away, a sort of flowing and tenacious being which slips between one's fingers; but no horror equals the sudden appearance of the octopus - Medusa served by eight serpents.

No grasp equals the embrace of the cephalopod.

It is the pneumatic machine attacking you. You have to deal with a vacuum furnished with paws. It neither scratches nor bites; an indescribable scarification. A bite is formidable, but less so than a suction. A claw is nothing beside the cupping glass. The claw means the beast entering into your flesh; the cupping glass means yourself entering into the beast.

Your muscles swell, your fibers writhe, your skin cracks under the foul weight, your blood spurts forth and mingles frightfully with the lymph of the mollusk. The creature superimposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with the hydra. You form but one. This dream is upon you. The tiger can only devour you; the octopus, oh! horror! breathes you in. It draws you to it, and into it; and, bound, ensnared,

powerless, you feel yourself slowly emptied into that frightful pond, which is the monster itself.

Beyond the terrible, being devoured alive, is the inexpressible, being drunk alive.

Such was the creature in whose power Gilliatt had been for several moments.

This monster was the inhabitant of that grotto. It was the frightful genius of the place. A sort of somber demon of the water.

All these magnificences had horror for their center.

A month previously, on the day when, the first time, Gilliatt had made his way into the grotto, the dark outline, of which he had caught a glimpse in the ripples of the water, was this octopus.

This was its home.

When Gilliatt, entering that cave for the second time in pursuit of the crab, had perceived the crevices in which he thought the crab had taken refuge, the octopus was lying in wait in that hole.

Can the reader picture that lying in wait?

Not a bird would dare to brood, not an egg would dare to hatch, not a flower would dare to open, not a breast would dare to give suck, not a heart would dare to love, not a spirit would dare to take flight, if one meditated on the sinister shapes patiently lying in ambush in the abyss. Gilliatt had thrust his arm into the hole; the octopus had seized it.

It held it.

He was the fly for this spider.

Gilliatt stood in water to his waist, his feet clinging to the slippery roundness of the stones, his right arm grasped