“Many a night have I lain upon a wet stone and looked far into the country, miles away from here; there are crafty creatures called in their speech men-folk. They plot against us, but usually we slip away from them; that I know well, and the sea-eel too, that you are asking about, he knows it. He has been under their sway, up there on the earth, time out of mind, and it was from there that they were carrying him off on a ship to a distant land. I saw what a trouble they had, Shut they could manage him, because he had become weak on the earth. They laid him in coils and circles. I heard how he ringled and rangled when they laid him down and when he slipped away from them out here. They held on to him with all their might—ever so many hands had hold of him, but he kept slipping away from them down to the bottom; there he is lying now—till further notice, I rather think.”
“He is quite thin,” said the small fishes.
“They have starved him,” said the seal, “but he will soon come to himself, and get his old size and corpulence again. I suppose he is the great sea-serpent that men are so afraid of and talk so much about. I never saw him before, and never believed in a sea-serpent; now I do. I believe he is the sea-serpent,” and with that down went the seal.
“How much he knew! how he talked!” said the small fishes; “I never was so wise before; if it only isn’t all an untruth.”
“We can, anyway, swim down and see for ourselves,” said the littlest fish; “on the way we can hear what the others think about it.”
“I wouldn’t make a stroke with my fins to get at something to know,” said the others, and turned away.
“But I would !“ said the littlest fellow, and put off down into deep water; but it was a good distance from the place where “the long thing that sank” lay. The little fish looked and hunted on all sides down in tne deep water. Never before had it imagined the world to be so big. The herrings went in great shoals, shining like a mighty ribbon of silver; the mackerel followed after, and looked even finer. There were fishes there of all fashions and marked with every possible color: jelly-fish, like half-transparent flowers, borne along by the currents. Great plants grew up from the floor of the ocean; grass, fathoms long, and palm-like trees, every leaf tenanted by shining shell-fish.
At last the little fish spied a long dark streak away down, and made his way toward it, but it was neither fish nor cable: it was the gunwale of a sunken vessel, which above and below the deck was broken in two by the force of the sea. The little fish swam into the cabin, where the people who perished when the vessel sank were all washed away, except two: a young woman lay there stretched out, with her little child in her arms. They seemed to be sleeping. The little fish was quite frightened, for it did not know that they never again could waken. Sea-weed hung like a net-work of foliage over the gun- wale above the two beautiful bodies of mother and babe. it was so quiet, so solitary: the little fish scampered away as fast as it could, out where the water was bright and clear, and there were fishes to see. It had not gone far before it met a whale, fearfully big.
“Don’t swallow me!” cried the little fish; “I am not even to be tasted, I am so small. and it is a great comfort to me to live.”
“What are you doing away down here, where your kind never come?” asked the whale.