"Well done, Little Stubbs!" cried Grummidge, as he watched the creature
disappearing. "You've often worried our lives in time past, but this
time you've saved 'em. Coil away the limbs, boys. We'll measure 'em
and enter 'em in the log when we go ashore."

It may interest the reader to know that the measurements were as
follows:--

The longer and thinner arm was nineteen feet in length; about three and
a half inches in circumference; of a pale pinkish colour, and
exceedingly strong and tough. As all the men agreed that more than ten
feet of the arm were left attached to the monster's body, the total
length must have been little short of thirty feet. Towards the
extremity it broadened out like an oar, and then tapered to a fine
tongue-like point. This part was covered with about two hundred
suckers, having horny-toothed edges, the largest of the suckers being
more than an inch in diameter, the smallest about the size of a pea.
The short arm was eleven feet long, and ten inches in circumference. It
was covered on the under side throughout its entire length with a double
row of suckers. Grummidge, who was prone to observe closely, counted
them that night with minute care, and came to the conclusion that the
creature must have possessed about eleven hundred suckers altogether.
There was also a tail to the fish--which Squill called a "divil-fish"--
shaped like a fin. It was two feet in width.

Lest any reader should imagine that we are romancing here, we turn aside
to refer him to a volume entitled _Newfoundland, the oldest British
Colony_, written by Joseph Hatton and the Reverend M. Harvey, in which
(pages 238 to 242) he will find an account of a giant-cuttlefish,
devil-fish, or squid, very similar to that which we have now described,
and in which it is also stated that Mr Harvey, in 1873, obtained
possession of one cuttlefish arm nineteen feet long, which he measured
and photographed, and described in various newspapers and periodicals,
and, finally, sent to the Geological Museum in St. John's, where it now
lies. The same gentleman afterwards obtained an uninjured specimen of
the fish, and it is well known that complete specimens, as well as
fragments, of the giant cephalopod now exist in several other museums.

Can any one wonder that marvellous tales of the sea were told that night
round the fires at supper-time? that Little Stubbs became eloquently
fabulous, and that Squill, drawing on his imagination, de