"You are spiteful."
"Not at all. I am standing up for art, and for nature too. For instance: Sabina has wrinkles. She says, too, that she has grey hairs coming. The former I won't see, and therefore don't. The latter I can't see, because I am not looking for them."
"Nor I either," said Stangrave smiling. "I assure you the announcement is new to me."
"Of course. Who can see wrinkles in the light of those eyes, that smile, that complexion?"
"Certainly," said Stangrave, "if I asked for her portrait, as I shall do some day, and the artist sat down and painted the said 'wastes of time,' on pretence of their being there, I should consider it an impertinence on his part. What business has he to spy out what nature has taken such charming trouble to conceal?"
"Again," said Claude, "such a face as Cordifiamma's. When it is at rest, in deep thought, there are lines in it which utterly puzzle one—touches which are Eastern, Kabyle, almost Quadroon."
Stangrave started. Claude went on unconscious:—
"But who sees them in the light of that beauty? They are defects, no doubt, but defects which no one would observe without deep study of the face. They express her character no more than a scar would; and therefore when I paint her, as I must and will, I shall utterly ignore them. If, on the other hand, I met the same lines in a face which I knew to have Quadroon blood in it, I should religiously copy them; because then they would be integral elements of the face. You understand?"
"Understand?—yes," answered Stangrave, in a tone which made Claude look up.
That strange scene of half an hour before flashed across him. What if it were no fancy? What if Marie had African blood in her veins? And Stangrave shuddered, and felt for the moment that thousands of pounds would be a cheap price to pay for the discovery that his fancy was a false one.
"Yes—oh—I beg your pardon," said he, recovering himself. "I was thinking of something else. But, as you say, what if she had Quadroon blood?"
"I? I never said so, or dreamt of it."
"Oh! I mistook. Do you know, though, where she came from?"
"I? You forget, my dear fellow, that you yourself introduced her to us."
"Of course; but I thought Mrs. Mellot might—women always makes confidences."
"All we know is, what I suppose you knew long ago, that her most intimate friend, next to you, seems to be an old friend of ours, named Thurnall."
"An old friend of yours?"
"Oh yes; we have known him these fifteen years. Met him first at Paris; and after that went round the world with him, and saw infinite adventures. Sabina and I spent three months with him once, among the savages in a South-sea Island, and a very pretty romance our stay and our escape would make. We were all three, I believe, to have been cooked and eaten, if Tom had not got us off by that wonderful address which, if you know him, you must know well enough."
"Yes," answered Stangrave, coldly, as in a dream; "I have known Mr. Thurnall in past years; but not in connection with La Signora Cordifiamma. I was not aware till this moment—this morning, I mean—that they knew each other."
"You astound me; why, she talks of him to us all day long, as of one to whom she has the deepest obligations; she was ready to rush into our arms when she first found that we knew him. He is a greater hero in her eyes, I sometimes fancy, than even you are. She does nothing (or fancies that she does nothing, for you know her pretty wilfulness) without writing for his advice."
"I a hero in her eyes? I was really not aware of that fact," said Stangrave, more coldly than ever; for bitter jealousy had taken possession of his heart. "Do you know, then, what this same obligation may be?"
"I never asked. I hate gossiping, and I make a rule to inquire into no secrets but such as are voluntarily confided to me; and I know that she has never told Sabina."
"I suppose she is married to him. That is the simplest explanation of the mystery."
"Impossible! What can you mean? If she ever marries living man, she will marry you."
"Then she will never marry living man," said Stangrave to himself. "Good-bye, my dear fellow; I have an engagement at the Traveller's." And away went Stangrave, leaving Claude sorely puzzled, but little dreaming of the powder-magazine into which he had put a match.
But he was puzzled still more that night, when by the latest post a note came—
"From Stangrave!" said Claude. "Why, in the name of all wonders!"—and he read:—
"Good-bye. I am just starting for the Continent, on sudden and urgent business. What my destination is I hardly can tell you yet. You will hear from me in the course of the summer."
Claude's countenance fell, and the note fell likewise. Sabina snatched it up, read it, and gave La Cordifiamma a look which made her spring from the sofa, and snatch it in turn.
She read it through, with trembling hands, and blanching cheeks, and then dropped fainting upon the floor.
They laid her on the sofa, and while they were recovering her, Claude told Sabina the only clue which he had to the American's conduct, namely, that afternoon's conversation.
Sabina shook her head over it; for to her, also, the American's explanation had suggested itself. Was Marie Thurnall's wife? Or did she—it was possible, however painful—stand to him in some less honourable relation, which she would fain forget now, in a new passion for Stangrave? For that Marie loved Stangrave, Sabina knew well enough.
The doubt was so ugly that it must be solved; and when she had got the poor thing safe into her bedroom she alluded to it as gently as she could.
Marie sprang up in indignant innocence.
"He! Whatever he may be to others, I know not: but to me he has been purity and nobleness itself—a brother, a father! Yes; if I had no other reason for trusting him, I should love him for that alone; that however tempted he may have been, and Heaven knows he was tempted, he could respect the honour of his friend, though that friend lay sleeping in a soldier's grave ten thousand miles away."
And Marie threw herself upon Sabina's neck, and under the pressure of her misery sobbed out to her the story of her life. What it was need not be told. A little common sense, and a little knowledge of human nature, will enable the reader to fill up for himself the story of a beautiful slave.
Sabina soothed her, and cheered her; and soothed and cheered her most of all by telling her in return the story of her own life; not so dark a one, but almost as sad and strange. And poor Marie took heart, when she found in her great need a sister in the communion of sorrows.
"And you have been through all this, so beautiful and bright as you are! You whom I should have fancied always living the life of the humming-bird: and yet not a scar or a wrinkle has it left behind!"
"They were there once, Marie! but God and Claude smoothed them away."
"I have no Claude,—and no God, I think, at times."
"No God, Marie! Then how did you come hither?"
Marie was silent, reproved; and then passionately—
"Why does He not right my people?"
That question was one to which Sabina's little scheme of the universe had no answer; why should it, while many a scheme which pretends to be far vaster and more infallible has none as yet?
So she was silent, and sat with Marie's head upon her bosom, caressing the black curls, till she had soothed her into sobbing exhaustion.
"There; lie there and rest: you shall be my child, my poor Marie. I have a fresh child every week; but I shall find plenty of room in my heart for you, my poor hunted deer."
"You will keep my secret?"
"Why keep it? No one need be ashamed of it here in free England."
"But he—he—you do not know, Sabina! Those Northerners, with all their boasts of freedom, shrink from us just as much as our own masters."
"Oh, Marie, do not be so unjust to him! He is too noble, and you must know it yourself."
"Ay, if he stood alone; if he were even going to live in England; if he would let himself be himself; but public opinion," sobbed the poor self-tormentor—"It has been his God, Sabina, to be a leader of taste and fashion—admired and complete—the Crichton of Newport and Brooklyn. And he could not bear scorn, the loss of society. Why should he bear it for me? If he had been one of the abolitionist party, it would have been different: but he has no sympathy with them, good, narrow, pious people, or they with him: he could not be satisfied in their society—or I either, for I crave after it all as much as he—wealth, luxury, art, brilliant company, admiration,—oh, inconsistent wretch, that I am! And that makes me love him all the more, and yet makes me so harsh to him, wickedly cruel, as I was to-day; because when I am reproving his weakness, I am reproving my own, and because I am angry with myself, I grow angry with him too—envious of him, I do believe at moments, and all his success and luxury!"
And so poor Marie sobbed out her confused confession of that strange double nature which so many Quadroons seem to owe to their mixed blood; a strong side of deep feeling, ambition, energy, an intellect rather Greek in its rapidity than English in sturdiness; and withal a weak side, of instability, inconsistency, hasty passion, love of present enjoyment, sometimes, too, a tendency to untruth, which is the mark, not perhaps of the African specially, but of every enslaved race.
Consolation was all that Sabina could give. It was too late to act. Stangrave was gone, and week after week rolled by without a line from the wanderer.
CHAPTER X.
THE RECOGNITION
Elsley Vavasour is sitting one morning in his study, every comfort of which is of Lucia's arrangement and invention, beating the home-preserve of his brains for pretty thoughts. On he struggles through that wild, and too luxuriant cover; now brought up by a "lawyer," now stumbling over a root, now bogged in a green spring, now flushing a stray covey of birds of Paradise, now a sphinx, chimaera, strix, lamia, fire-drake, flying-donkey, two-headed eagle (Austrian, as will appear shortly), or other portent only to be seen now-a-days in the recesses of that enchanted forest, the convolutions of a poet's brain. Up they whir and rattle, making, like most game, more noise than they are worth. Some get back, some dodge among the trees; the fair shots are few and far between: but Elsley blazes away right and left with trusty quill; and, to do him justice, seldom misses his aim, for practice has made him a sure and quick marksman in his own line. Moreover, all is game which gets up to-day; for he is shooting for the kitchen, or rather for the London market, as many a noble sportsman does now-a-days, and thinks no shame. His new volume of poems ("The Wreck" included) is in the press: but behold, it is not as long as the publisher thinks fit, and Messrs. Brown and Younger have written down to entreat in haste for some four hundred lines more, on any subject which Mr. Vavasour may choose. And therefore is Elsley beating his home covers, heavily shot over though they have been already this season, in hopes that a few head of his own game may still be left: or in default (for human nature is the same, in poets and in sportsmen), that a few head may have strayed in out of his neighbours' manors.
At last the sport slackens; for the sportsman is getting tired, and hungry also, to carry on the metaphor; for he has seen the postman come up the front walk a quarter of an hour since, and the letters have not been brought in yet.
At last there is a knock at the door, which he answers by a somewhat testy "come in." But he checks the coming grumble, when not the maid, but Lucia enters.
Why not grumble at Lucia? He has done so many a time.
Because she looks this morning so charming; really quite pretty again, so radiant is her face with smiles. And because, also, she holds triumphant above her head a newspaper.
She dances up to him—
"I have something for you."
"For me? Why, the post has been in this half-hour."
"Yes, for you, and that's just the reason why I kept it myself. D'ye understand my Irish reasoning?"
"No, you pretty creature," said Elsley, who saw that whatever the news was, it was good news.
"Pretty creature, am I? I was once, I know; but I thought you had forgotten all about that. But I was not going to let you have the paper till I had devoured every word of it myself first."
"Every word of what?"
"Of what you shan't have unless you promise to be good for a week. Such a Review; and from America! What a dear man he must be who wrote it! I really think I should kiss him if I met him."
"And I really think he would not say no. But as he's not here, I shall act as his proxy."
"Be quiet, and read that, if you can, for blushes;" and she spread out the paper before him, and then covered his eyes with her hands. "No, you shan't see it; it will make you vain."
Elsley had looked eagerly at the honeyed columns; (as who would not have done?) but the last word smote him. What was he thinking of? his own praise, or his wife's love?
"Too true," he cried, looking up at her. "You dear creature! Vain I am, God forgive me: but before I look at a word of this I must have a talk with you."
"I can't stop; I must run back to the children. No; now don't look cross;" as his brow clouded, "I only said that to tease you. I'll stop with you ten whole minutes, if you won't look so very solemn and important. I hate tragedy faces. Now what is it?"
As all this was spoken while both her hands were clasped round Elsley's neck, and with looks and tones of the very sweetest as well as the very sauciest, no offence was given, and none taken: but Elsley's voice was sad as he asked,—
"So you really do care for my poems?"
"You great silly creature? Why else did I marry you at all? As if I cared for anything in the world but your poems; as if I did not love everybody who praises them; and if any stupid reviewer dares to say a word against them I could kill him on the spot. I care for nothing in the world but what people say of you.—And yet I don't care one pin; I know what your poems are, if nobody else does; and they belong to me, because you belong to me, and I must be the best judge, and care for nobody, no not I!"—And she began singing, and then hung over him, tormenting him lovingly while he read.
It was a true American review, utterly extravagant in its laudations, whether from over-kindness, or from a certain love of exaggeration and magniloquence, which makes one suspect that a large proportion of the Transatlantic gentlemen of the press must be natives of the sister isle: but it was all the more pleasant to the soul of Elsley.
"There," said Lucia, as she clung croodling to him; "there is a pretty character of you, sir! Make the most of it, for it is all those Yankees will ever send you."
"Yes," said Elsley, "if they would send one a little money, instead of making endless dollars by printing one's books, and then a few more by praising one at a penny a line."
"That's talking like a man of business: if instead of the review, now, a cheque for fifty pounds had come, how I would have rushed out and paid the bills!"
"And liked it a great deal better than the review?"
"You jealous creature! No. If I could always have you praised, I'd live in a cabin, and go about the world barefoot, like a wild Irish girl."
"You would make a very charming one."
"I used to, once, I can tell you, Valencia and I used to run about without shoes and stockings at Kilanbaggan, and you can't think how pretty and white this little foot used to look on a nice soft carpet of green moss."
"I shall write a sonnet to it."
"You may if you choose, provided you don't publish it."
"You may trust me for that. I am not one of those who anatomise their own married happiness for the edification of the whole public, and make fame, if not money, out of their own wives' hearts."
"How I should hate you, if you did! Not that I believe their fine stories about themselves. At least, I am certain it's only half the story. They have their quarrels, my dear, just as you and I have but they take care not to put them into poetry."
"Well, but who could? Whether they have a right or not to publish the poetical side of their married life, it is too much to ask them to give you the unpoetical also."
"Then they are all humbugs, and I believe, if they really love their wives so very much, they would not be at all that pains to persuade the world of it."
"You are very satirical and spiteful, ma'am."
"I always am when I am pleased. If I am particularly happy, I always long to pinch somebody. I suppose it's Irish—
"'Comes out, meets a friend, and for love knocks him down.'"
"But you know, you rogue, that you care to read no poetry but love poetry."
"Of course not every woman does, but let me find you publishing any such about me, and see what I will do to you! There, now I must go to my work, and you go and write something extra superfinely grand, because I have been so good to you. No. Let me go; what a bother you are. Good-bye."
And away she tripped, and he returned to his work, happier than he had been for a week past.
His happiness, truly, was only on the surface. The old wound had been salved—as what wound cannot be?—by woman's love and woman's wit but it was not healed. The cause of his wrong doing, the vain, self-indulgent spirit, was there still unchastened, and he was destined, that very day, to find that he had still to bear the punishment of it.
Now the reader must understand, that though one may laugh at Elsley Vavasour, because it is more pleasant than scolding at him, yet have Philistia and Fogeydom neither right nor reason to consider him a despicable or merely ludicrous person, or to cry, "Ah, if he had been as we are!"
Had he been merely ludicrous, Lucia would never have married him; and he could only have been spoken of with indignation, or left utterly out of the story, as a simply unpleasant figure, beyond the purposes of a novel, though admissible now and then into tragedy. One cannot heartily laugh at a man if one has not a lurking love for him, as one really ought to have for Elsley. How much value is to be attached to his mere power of imagination and fancy, and so forth, is a question; but there was in him more than mere talent: there was, in thought at least, virtue and magnanimity.
True, the best part of him, perhaps almost all the good part of him, spent itself in words, and must be looked for, not in his life, but in his books. But in those books it can be found; and if you look through them, you will see that he has not touched upon a subject without taking, on the whole, the right, and pure, and lofty view of it. Howsoever extravagant he may be in his notions of poetic licence, that licence is never with him a synonym for licentiousness. Whatever is tender and true, whatever is chivalrous and high-minded, he loves at first sight, and reproduces it lovingly. And it may be possible that his own estimate of his poems was not altogether wrong; that his words may have awakened here and there in others a love for that which is morally as well as physically beautiful, and may have kept alive in their hearts the recollection that, both for the bodies and the souls of men forms of life far nobler and fairer than those which we see now are possible; that they have appeared, in fragments at least, already on the earth; that they are destined, perhaps, to reappear and combine themselves in some ideal state, and in
"One far-off divine event,
Toward which the whole creation moves."
This is the special and proper function of the poet; that he may do this, does God touch his lips with that which, however it may be misused, is still fire from off the altar beneath which the spirits of his saints cry,—"Lord, how long?" If he "reproduce the beautiful" with this intent, however so little, then is he of the sacred guild. And because Vavasour had this gift, therefore he was a poet.
But in this he was weak: that he did not feel, or at least was forgetting fast, that this gift had been bestowed on him for any practical purpose. No one would demand that he should have gone forth with some grand social scheme, to reform a world which looked to him so mean and evil. He was not a man of business, and was not meant to be one. But it was ill for him that in his fastidiousness and touchiness he had shut himself out from that world, till he had quite forgotten how much good there was in it as well as evil; how many people—commonplace and unpoetical it may be—but still heroical in God's sight, were working harder than he ever worked, at the divine drudgery of doing good, and that in dens of darkness and sloughs of filth, from which he would have turned with disgust; so that the sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems, and which perhaps verges on sentimentalism, gradually gives place to a Pharisaic and contemptuous tone; a tone more lofty and manful in seeming, but far less divine in fact. Perhaps comparative success had injured him. Whilst struggling himself against circumstances, poor, untaught, unhappy, he had more fellow-feeling, with those whom circumstance oppressed. At least, the pity which he could once bestow upon the misery which he met in his daily walks, he now kept for the more picturesque woes of Italy and Greece.
In this, too, he was weak; that he had altogether forgotten that the fire from off the altar could only be kept alight by continual self-restraint and self-sacrifice, by continual gentleness and humility, shown in the petty matters of everyday home-life; and that he who cannot rule his own household can never rule the Church of God. And so it befell, that amid the little cross-blasts of home squabbles the sacred spark was fast going out. The poems written after he settled at Penalva are marked by a less definite purpose, by a lower tone of feeling: not, perhaps, by a lower moral tone; but simply by less of any moral tone at all. They are more and more full of merely sensuous beauty, mere word-painting, mere word-hunting. The desire of finding something worth saying gives place more and more to that of saying something in a new fashion. As the originality of thought (which accompanies only vigorous moral purpose) decreases, the attempt at originality of language increases. Manner, in short, has taken the place of matter. The art, it may be, of his latest poems is greatest: but it has been expended on the most unworthy themes. The later are mannered caricatures of the earlier, without their soul; and the same change seems to have passed over him which (with Mr. Ruskin's pardon) transformed the Turner of 1820 into the Turner of 1850.
Thus had Elsley transferred what sympathy he had left from needle-women and ragged schools, dwellers in Jacob's Island and sleepers in the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge, to sufferers of a more poetic class. Whether his sympathies showed thereby that he had risen or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself. It is a credit to any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world has ever seen. Elsley need not be blamed for pitying her; only for holding, with most of our poets, a vague notion that her woes were to be cured by a hair of the dog who bit her; viz., by homoeopathic doses of that same "art" which has been all along her morbid and self-deceiving substitute for virtue and industry. So, as she had sung herself down to the nether pit, Elsley would help to sing her up again; and had already been throwing off, ever since 1848, a series of sonnets which he entitled Eurydice, intimating, of course, that he acted as the Orpheus. Whether he had hopes of drawing iron tears down Pluto Radetzky's cheek, does not appear; but certainly the longer poem which had sprung from his fancy, at the urgent call of Messrs. Brown and Younger, would have been likely to draw nothing but iron balls from Radetzky's cannon; or failing so vast an effect, an immediate external application to the poet himself of that famous herb Pantagruelion, cure for all public ills and private woes, which men call hemp. Nevertheless, it was a noble subject; one which ought surely to have been taken up by some of our poets, for if they do not make a noble poem of it, it will be their own fault. I mean that sad and fantastic tragedy of Fra Dolcino and Margaret, which Signor Mariotti has lately given to the English public, in a book which, both for its matter and its manner, should be better known than it is. Elsley's soul had been filled (it would have been a dull one else) with the conception of the handsome and gifted patriot-monk, his soul delirious with, the dream of realising a perfect Church on earth; battling with tongue and pen, and at last with sword, against the villanies of pope and kaiser, and all the old devourers of the earth, cheered only by the wild love of her who had given up wealth, fame, friends, all which render life worth having, to die with him a death too horrible for words. And he had conceived (and not altogether ill) a vision, in which, wandering along some bright Italian bay, he met Dolcino sitting, a spirit at rest but not yet glorified, waiting for the revival of that dead land for which he had died; and Margaret by him, dipping her scorched feet for ever in the cooling wave, and looking up to the hero for whom she had given up all, with eyes of everlasting love. There they were to prophesy to him such things as seemed fit to him, of the future of Italy and of Europe, of the doom of priests and tyrants, of the sorrows and rewards of genius unappreciated and before its age; for Elsley's secret vanity could see in himself a far greater likeness to Dolcino, than Dolcino—the preacher, confessor, bender of all hearts, man of the world and man of action, at last crafty and all but unconquerable guerilla warrior—would ever have acknowledged in the self-indulgent dreamer. However, it was a fair conception enough; though perhaps it never would have entered Elsley's head, had Shelley never written the opening canto of the Revolt of Islam.
So Elsley, on a burning July forenoon, strolled up the lane and over the down to King Arthur's Nose, that he might find materials for his sea-shore scene. For he was not one of those men who live in such quiet, everyday communication with nature, that they drink in her various aspects as unconsciously as the air they breathe; and so can reproduce them, out of an inexhaustible stock of details, simply and accurately, and yet freshly too, tinged by the peculiar hue of the mind in which they have been long sleeping. He walked the world, either blind to the beauty round him, and trying to compose instead some little scrap of beauty in his own self-imprisoned thoughts; or else he was looking out consciously and spasmodically for views, effects, emotions, images; something striking and uncommon which would suggest a poetic figure, or help out a description, or in some way re-furnish his mind with thought. From which method it befell, that his lamp of truth was too often burnt out just when it was needed; and that, like the foolish virgins, he had to go and buy oil when it was too late; or failing that, to supply its place with some baser artificial material.
That day, however, he was fortunate enough; for wandering and scrambling among the rocks, at a dead low spring tide, he came upon a spot which would have made a poem of itself better than all Elsley ever wrote, had he, forgetting all about Fra Dolcino, Italy, priests, and tyrants, set down in black and white just what he saw; provided, of course, that he had patience first to see the same.
It was none other than that ghastly chasm across which Thurnall had been so miraculously swept, on the night of his shipwreck. The same ghastly chasm: but ghastly now no longer; and as Elsley looked down, the beauty below invited him, and the coolness also; for the sun beat on the flat rock above till it scorched the feet, and dazzled the eye, and crisped up the blackening sea-weeds; while every sea-snail crept to hide itself under the bladder-tangle, and nothing dared to peep or stir save certain grains of gunpowder, which seemed to have gone mad, so merrily did they hop about upon the surface of the fast evaporating salt-pools. That wonder, indeed, Elsley stooped to examine, and drew back his hands with an "ugh!" and a gesture of disgust, when he found that they were "nasty little insects." For Elsley held fully the poet's right to believe that all things are not very good; none, indeed, save such as suited his eclectic and fastidious taste; and to hold (on high aesthetic grounds, of course) toads and spiders in as much abhorrence as does any boarding-school girl. However, finding some rock ledges which formed a natural ladder, down he scrambled, gingerly enough, for he was neither an active nor a courageous man. But, once down, I will do him the justice to say, that for five whole minutes he forgot all about Fra Dolcino, and, what was better, about himself also.
The chasm may have been fifteen feet deep, and above, about half that breadth; but below, the waves had hollowed it into dark overhanging caverns. Just in front of him a huge boulder spanned the crack; and formed a natural doorway, through which he saw, like a picture set in a frame, the far-off blue sea softening into the blue sky among brown Eastern haze. Amid the haze a single ship hung motionless, like a white cloud. Nearer, a black cormorant floated sleepily along, and dived, and rose again. Nearer again, long lines of flat tide-rock, glittering and quivering in the heat, sloped gradually under the waves, till they ended in half-sunken beds of olive oar-weed, which bent their tangled stems into a hundred graceful curves, and swayed to and fro slowly and sleepily. The low swell slid whispering among their floating palms, and slipped on toward the cavern's mouth, as if asking wistfully (so Elsley fancied) when it would be time for it to return to that cool shade, and hide from all the blinding blaze outside. But when his eye was enough accustomed to the shade within, it withdrew gladly from the glaring sea and glaring tide-rocks to the walls of the chasm itself; to curved and polished sheets of stone, rich brown, with snow-white veins, on which danced for ever a dappled network of pale yellow light; to crusted beds of pink coralline; to caverns, in the dark crannies of which hung branching sponges and tufts of purple sea-moss; to strips of clear white sand, bestrewn with shells; to pools, each a gay flower-garden of all hues, where branching sea-weeds reflected blue light from every point, like a thousand damasked sword-blades; while among them, dahlias and chrysanthemums, and many another mimic of our earth-born flowers, spread blooms of crimson, and purple, and lilac, and creamy grey, half-buried among feathered weeds as brightly coloured as they; and strange and gaudy fishes shot across from side to side, and chased each other in and out of hidden cells.