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In a moment I was assailed with epithets that . . . and not a word is to be got in when he is so violent. One has to make up one's mind to act Andromeda, and let him be the sea-monster, as somebody has said; I forget the exact origin of the remark. The squire certainly had a whole ocean at command. I strung myself to pass through the same performance. To my astonishment I went unchallenged.
Once, for example, I found a dead seal which a recent tempest had tossed into the nook of the rocks, where his shaggy carcase lay rolled in a heap of eel-grass as if the sea-monster sought to hide himself from my eye.
This was a cross-grained curmudgeon of a negro, named Pluto, who was a kind of enigma in Communipaw. Where he came from, nobody knew. He was found one morning, after a storm, cast like a sea-monster on the strand, in front of the Wild Goose, and lay there, more dead than alive.
The nose of the shark is his most vulnerable part; and the natives, who eat this sea-monster as willingly as he eats them, often inflict a fatal wound by slinging a huge stone at his nose and battering it to a jelly as he rises out of the water.
Then she turned her face to her father's shoulder, conscious of nothing but the fact that Warwick had come and gone. A cannon boomed, the crowd cheered, the last cable was flung off, and the steamer glided from her moorings with the surge of water and the waft of wind like some sea-monster eager to be out upon the ocean free again. "Look up, Sylvia; she will soon pass from sight."
continued the third officer, who was about to say "as a woman's mind;" but he concluded that it was not quite respectful to the lovely being before him. "What a poetical sea-monster you are, Mr. Scott!" exclaimed Miss Blanche with a silvery laugh. "I won't do so any more," Scott protested, and then continued his explanation.
For it was here, if we can credit serious Roman historians, that the Imperial tyrant, half crazy with terror and ever thirsting for human blood, was wont to hurl the objects of his hate into the sea; “from this eminence,” Suetonius gravely tells us, “after the application of long drawn-out and exquisite tortures, Tiberius used to order his executioners to fling their victims before his eyes into the water, where boats full of mariners, stationed below, were waiting in readiness to beat the bruised bodies with oars, in case any spark of life might yet be left in them.” The terrible legend fits in aptly with the appearance of this forbidding dizzy precipice, especially on a dark stormy afternoon, when the dull roar of the waves dashing against the cliffs below, mounts upward to the Villa Jovis like the angry bellowing of some insatiable sea-monster.
The voyage to Albany, against a stiff wind, occupied thirty-two hours; the return trip was made in thirty. H. Freeland, one of the spectators who stood on the banks of the Hudson when the boat made its maiden voyage in 1807, gives the following description: "Some imagined it to be a sea-monster whilst others did not hesitate to express their belief that it was a sign of the approaching judgment.
Tommy soon returned with a tumbler of hot brandy and water, followed by the steward with a pile of blankets. "Hold that a minute," said the boy, handing the tumbler to a little old gentleman who stood swaying to and fro with the motion of the vessel, and staring at Bax as if he had been a half-drowned sea-monster.
Each of us envied the other, when we weren't thinking seriously about it. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully thrilling and romantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hot stuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realized that neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot.
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