In the first place, Emilius absolutely refused to eat, in water or out. Understanding from our one authority that he needed a carnivorous diet, we tempted him, day after day, with every variety of meat brought to our door in the butcher's white-hooded cart with its retinue of hungry dogs, but nothing whatever would our boarder touch. And in the second place, he was, unlike Diogenes, forever scrambling out of his tub and digging himself in at one point or another on the bank. Several times a day one or the other of us might be seen tugging up Emilius by his cord from the bowels of the earth and solicitously dumping him down again into his tub of water, which a shovelful of mud, shreds of meat and other attractions still failed to render homelike. His one object in life was to get out of it.
"If Emilius would only take a nap!" I sighed one warm afternoon, when I had just rescued him from a deep pit of his frenzied digging for the third time that day.
"Read him poetry," advised Joy-of-Life. Magical snatches of Bliss Carman's deep-sea songs ran through my head:—
"When sheering down to the Line
Come polar tides from the North,
Thy silver folk of the brine
Must glimmer and forth;"
* * * * *
"The myriad fins are moving,
The marvelous flanges play."