nd--cacodaemon that he was--ran off, hook and all. Well, that fish
haunted me; never before had I seen such a fish. Minnows I had caught in
the Thames and elsewhere, also gudgeons, and occasionally a dace. But
a fish like that--a PERCH, all his fins up, like the sails of a
man-of-war--a monster perch,--a whale of a perch! No, never till then
had I known what leviathans lie hid within the deeps. I could not sleep
till I had returned; and again, sir,--I caught that perch. And this time
I pulled him fairly out of the water. He escaped; and how did he escape?
Sir, he left his eye behind him on the hook. Years, long years, have
passed since then; but never shall I forget the agony of that moment."

LEONARD.--"To the perch, sir?"

ANGLER.--"Perch! agony to him! He enjoyed it. Agony to me! I gazed on
that eye, and the eye looked as sly and as wicked as if it were laughing
in my face. Well, sir, I had heard that there is no better bait for a
perch than a perch's eye. I adjusted that eye on the hook, and dropped
in the line gently. The water was unusually clear; in two minutes I
saw that perch return. He approached the hook; he recognized his eye,
frisked his tail, made a plunge, and, as I live, carried off the
eye, safe and sound; and I saw him digesting it by the side of that
water-lily. The mocking fiend! Seven times since that day, in the course
of a varied and eventful life, have I caught that perch, and seven times
has that perch escaped."

LEONARD (astonished).--"It can't be the same perch; perches are very
tender fish. A hook inside of it, and an eye hooked out of it--no perch
could withstand such havoc in its constitution."

ANGLER (with an appearance of awe).--"It does seem supernatural. But it
is that perch; for hark ye, sir, there is ONLY ONE perch in the whole
brook! All the years I have fished here, I have never caught another
perch; and this solitary inmate of the watery element I know by sight
better than I knew my own lost father. For each time that I have raised
it out of the water, its profile has been turned to me, and I have seen
with a shudder that it has had only--One Eye! It is a most mysterious
and a most diabolical phenomenon, that perch! It has been the ruin of my
prospects in life. I was offered a situation in Jamaica: I could not
go with that perch left here in triumph. I might afterwards have had an
appointinent in India, but I could not put the ocean between myself
and that perch: thus have I fr