and cared for. But the fish has but one piece from his nose to
his tail. He is complete, single and unencumbered. He turns in
one turn, and goes up and down and round in one sole movement.

"How I flew through the soft element: how I joyed in the country
where there is no harshness: in the element which upholds and
gives way; which caresses and lets go, and will not let you fall.
For man may stumble in a furrow; the stag tumble from a cliff;
the hawk, wing-weary and beaten, with darkness around him and the
storm behind, may dash his brains against a tree. But the home of
the salmon is his delight, and the sea guards all her creatures."



CHAPTER IX

"I became the king of the salmon, and, with my multitudes, I
ranged on the tides of the world. Green and purple distances were
under me: green and gold the sunlit regions above. In these
latitudes I moved through a world of amber, myself amber and
gold; in those others, in a sparkle of lucent blue, I curved, lit
like a living jewel: and in these again, through dusks of ebony
all mazed with silver, I shot and shone, the wonder of the sea.

"I saw the monsters of the uttermost ocean go heaving by; and the
long lithe brutes that are toothed to their tails: and below,
where gloom dipped down on gloom, vast, livid tangles that coiled
and uncoiled, and lapsed down steeps and hells of the sea where
even the salmon could not go.