This flat-sided, great-eyed, big-headed creature, with a huge back fin, and general ugliness painted in it everywhere, had a dark mark on either side of the body; and though arrayed and burnished here and there with metallic colours, the fish was so grotesque that its beauties were quite ignored.
“Ah! our friend John-Dory—Jean Doré, as the French call him—gilded John,” said Mr Temple. “A delicacy, but not a handsome fish. Look at the thumb and finger marks upon his side.”
“Oh! but those are not finger marks,” cried Dick.
“No,” said his father, “but they are quite near enough in appearance to make people say that this is the fish Peter caught, and held between his finger and thumb while he opened its mouth.”
“Here y’are, sir!” shouted a fisherman. “Young gents like to see this?”
Josh rowed the boat alongside and Dick held his net, while the fisherman laughingly turned into it from his own a great jelly-fish, as clear as crystal and glistening in the sun with iridescent colours of the loveliest hue.
“Oh, what a beauty!” cried Dick. “Look, father, look!”
“Yes; keep it in the water, you will see it to the best advantage there.”
Dick doused the jelly-fish down into the sun-lit waters, and then they could see its wonderful nature.
In size it was as big as a skittle-ball or a flat Dutch cheese, though a better idea of its shape may be obtained by comparing it to a half-opened mushroom whose stalk had been removed, and where beautifully cut leafy transparencies took the place of the mushroom gills.