hat."

"Well," replied the collector, "a jellyfish can be tolerable poisonous.
The Portuguese man-o'-war, pretty enough to look at when it floats on
the water, with long streamers o' purple threads flowin' out behind, is
the only thing that I ever heard of that killed a man."

"A jellyfish? How?"

"It was all his own fault," was the reply. "It was down in the Bahamas,
off Nassau, as I remember. The sea was just alive with jellyfish, an'
this young fellow that I'm tellin' about, he swam around a good deal an'
once or twice had run into a jellyfish without gettin' stung. There's
only some o' them that sting."

"I thought all of them did a little?"

"No, only a few. Well, this chap knew enough, I reckon, to keep away
from a Portuguese man-o'-war usually, but either he had got reckless or
didn't think of it. Some of his friends shouted out to him to take care,
but he laughed back, tellin' them they were foolish to believe old
stories, and to show that he didn't care, in a spirit o' 'dare' he dived
plumb under the jellyfish. But he misjudged his distance an' came up
clean in the middle of it an' the stingin' hairs just closed all over on
him."

"There are hundreds of them, too, aren't there?"

"Thousands of stingin' filaments in some o' them. He gave one wild
scream an' went down. When he came up and his friends were able to grasp
him he was paralyzed as though he had suffered an electric shock, an'
before they could get him to shore his body had broken out in a violent
rash. The doctors couldn't do anythin' for him an' he died three days
later."

"Have you ever been stung?"

"I know enough to keep away from a jellyfish," was the blunt rejoinder;
"but I had a nasty time with a torpedo once."

"The electric ray?" queried Colin. "That fish that looks like a small
sea vampire only it hasn't a whip-like tail?"

"That's it," said the older man. "It was when I was just a youngster, I
was haulin' in a net, when my feet slipped from under an' I went
headlong into the middle o' the net, and a torpedo landed on the back
o' my neck. I reckon he must have shocked the spinal cord or something
because I was fair paralyzed for an hour or two. You're sure to get one
yourself," he continued, "because they use torpedoes for research work a
good deal, but a shock in the hand or on the arm passes away in a few
minutes, so that you don't need to worry about that. The electric
eels--which are not eels at all, though they look like i