limpid glades--and this light, spreading over the
white interior of their dwelling, decorates it with all the fleeting
colors of the iris, giving to the limestone the mysterious shimmer of
mother-of-pearl.

Ulysses admired the odd forms of their winding passageways. They were
like the palaces of the Orient, dark and forbidding on the outside,
glistening within like a lake of pearl. Some received their terrestrial
names because of the special form of their shell--the rabbit, the
helmet, triton's horn, the cask, the Mediterranean parasol.

They were grazing with bucolic tranquillity on the maritime pasture
lands, contemplated from afar by the mussels, the oysters, and other
bi-valves, attached to the rocks by a hard and horny hank of silk that
enwrapped their enclosures. Some of these shells, called hams,--clams
of great size, with valves in the form of a club,--had fixed themselves
upright in the mire, giving the appearance of a submerged Celtic camp,
with a succession of obelisks swallowed up by the depths of the sea.

The one called the date-shell can, assisted by its liquid acid, pierce
the hardest stone with its cylindrical gimlet. The columns of Hellenic
temples, submerged in the Gulf of Naples and brought to light by an
earthquake, are bored from one end to the other by this diminutive
perforator.

Cries of surprise and nervous laughter suddenly reached Ferragut. They
came from that part of the Aquarium where the fish tanks were. In the
corridor was a little trough of water and at the bottom a kind of rag,
flabby and gray, with black rings on the back. This animal always
attracted the immediate curiosity of the visitors. Everybody would ask
for it.

Groups of countrymen, city families preceded by their offspring, pairs
of soldiers, all might be seen consulting before it and experimenting,
advancing their hands over the trough with a certain hesitation.
Finally they would touch the living rag at the bottom,--the gelatinous
flesh of the fish-torpedo,--receiving a series of electric shocks which
quickly made them loosen their prey, laughing and raising the other
hand to their jerking arms.

Ulysses on reaching the fish tanks had the sensation of a traveler who,
after having lived among inferior humanity, encounters beings that are
almost of his own race.

There was the oceanic aristocracy, the fish free as the sea, swift,
undulating and slippery, like the waves. They all had accompanied him
for many years, ap