"In Heaven's name, what was it?" I asked excitedly, as the old artist paused to empty and refill his pipe.
"Nothing but a giant squid, or octopus. Except that it was bigger than any ever seen before, and invisible to the eye, of course. Did you ever read Hugo's terrible story of Gilliat's fight with a squid?"
I had, and nodded.
"Hugo's imagination could not give him a creature—no matter how formidable—larger than one of four feet stretch. This one had three tentacles around me, two others gripped the port and starboard pin-rails, and three were gripping the stump of the mainmast. It had a reach of forty feet, I should think, comparing it with the beam of the craft.
"But there was one part of each picture, ill defined and missing. My knife and right hand were not shown. They were buried in a dark lump, which could be nothing but the blood from my veins. Unconscious, but still struggling, I had struck into the soft body of the monster, and struck true."
NOAH'S ARK
Sam Rogers told me the story that follows, as we sat in the coils of the foremain and topsail braces—easy chairs aboard ship—and, sheltered from the blast of wind and spume by the high-weather rail, killed time in the night-watch by yarn-spinning.
For neither of us had a wheel or lookout that night; and as he and I were the only Americans in the forward end of the ship, we naturally sought each other for communion and counsel—he, a tall, straight, and slim man of fifty, an ex-man-of-war's man; I, a boy, beginning the battle of life.
Sam was an inveterate reader; and, while his diction embraced a choice stock of profanity, which he used when aroused, it also expressed itself in the choicest of English, his sentences full of commas, semicolons, and periods. He reeled off his stories as though reading from a book.