"Good-night, father," replied Walter, heartily; and both retired to their humble beds, and were soon wrapped in deep and healthful slumber.
[to be continued.]
A GIGANTIC JELLY-FISH.
Few excursions can be proposed more acceptable to young folks than going a-fishing, and perhaps the most delightful sort of fishing is to be had by accompanying some old fisherman out into the broad ocean.
There are many circumstances that contribute to make a day's sport of this kind more enjoyable than pond or river fishing, and not the least of these consists in the wonderful variety of the creatures to be caught.
In our inland streams and lakes in any given locality the kinds of fish to be caught are well known, and, comparatively speaking, there are not many different sorts; but in ocean fishing the oldest fisherman, and those most accustomed to the sorts of fish generally found in their fishing grounds, every once in a while happen upon creatures the likes of which have seldom, perhaps never, been seen before. Only a short time since a Nantucket fisherman, rowing slowly along, buried the prow of his boat in some partly yielding substance that brought him to a stand-still. Somewhat startled, he went forward, oar in hand, to find his little craft imbedded in the body of an enormous jelly-fish, the largest ever seen. The soft and yielding body of the creature offered so little resistance to his oar when he tried to push off, and he saw himself so hopelessly entangled in the mass of slime and tentacles, that, instead of attempting to free himself, he determined to tow it ashore, which he did by passing a sail-cloth under its body and rowing slowly homeward.
THE CAPTURE.
Of course the rough encounter with the boat had considerably mutilated the jelly-fish, and torn away portions of the long thread-like processes or tentacles that hang from the central mass; yet these, when the creature was laid along the sand of the ocean beach, measured over two hundred feet in length, and it is conjectured that, uninjured and stretched to their utmost length, they could not have been less than three hundred feet long. The great shield-like body of the animal was found to be over nine feet in diameter, two feet more than the largest heretofore known, which is described by Professor Agassiz, who measured it while it was floating lazily on the surface of the water. This specimen was so large that the professor feared his account of it might be considered exaggerated.