iguanodons and water-kelpies.

"So the company fished for minnows, and not a word could we say about
our pearl-fisheries and coral-banks! And as for fishing for minnows
ourselves, my dear boy, we should have been less bewildered if you had
asked us to fish for a mermaid! Do you see, now, one reason why I have
let you go thus early into the world? Well, but amongst these minnow-
fishers there was one who fished with an air that made the minnows look
larger than salmons.

"Trevanion had been at Cambridge with me. We were even intimate. He
was a young man like myself, with his way to make in the world. Poor as
I, of a family upon a par with mine, old enough, but decayed. There
was, however, this difference between us: he had connections in the
great world; I had none. Like me, his chief pecuniary resource was a
college fellowship. Now, Trevanion had established a high reputation at
the University; but less as a scholar, though a pretty fair one, than as
a man to rise in life. Every faculty he had was an energy. He aimed at
everything: lost some things, gained others. He was a great speaker in
a debating society, a member of some politico-economical club. He was
an eternal talker,--brilliant, various, paradoxical, florid; different
from what he is now, for, dreading fancy, his career since has been one
effort to curb it. But all his mind attached itself to something that
we Englishmen call solid; it was a large mind,--not, my dear Kitty, like
a fine whale sailing through knowledge from the pleasure of sailing, but
like a polypus, that puts forth all its feelers for the purpose of
catching hold of something. Trevanion had gone at once to London from
the University; his reputation and his talk dazzled his connections, not
unjustly. They made an effort, they got him into Parliament; he had
spoken, he had succeeded. He came to Compton in the flush of his virgin