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Then there is the angel-fish, they have fins like wings of a pale blue colour; but they must be fallen angels to be in such a place as that hole too, musn't they? and yet they are handsome even now.
After this performance was over the keeper was willing to talk less idly, and showed a very considerable knowledge of the species found in Bermuda waters. "I noticed," Colin said, "that you fed the angel-fish with sea-urchin. I don't see how they can eat it with their tiny mouths, I should think the spines would get in the way."
The feeding of the fish was a matter of more interest, and it was striking to observe that the angel-fish and groupers were able to recognize their respective summons to food, for when the keeper tapped one portion of the bridge it gave a sharp cracking sound to which the angel-fish came flocking, while in calling the groupers and other fish, he hit another portion of the bridge, which reverberated in a different tone, and the larger fish dashed through the water to the appointed places.
Still a few are remembered; such as the yellow-tailed snapper, striped snapper, pork-fish, angel-fish, cat-fish, hound-fish, the grouper, sucking-fish, and so on. Both harbor and deep sea fishing afford the visitor to Nassau excellent amusement, and many sportsmen go thither annually from New York solely for its enjoyment.
In this passage we were continually accompanied by vast shoals of fish, as dolphins, bonitas, albicores, and angel-fish. These last are shaped like salmon, and have scales like them, but have tails like dolphins, and nearly resemble them when, in the water, appearing in all the beautiful colours displayed by the dolphin. Besides, they are the best for eating of any fish that swim near the surface.
The blue birds have dull red breasts like our robins, with turquoise-blue backs and wings, glinting with the same metallic sheen on the blue that the angel-fish display in the water. As with our kingfishers, one has the sense of a brilliant flash of blue light shooting past one.
Oh, you had better keep clear of an angel-fish. A toad-fish looked like an enormous, swimming toad. Bless me! I caught sight of a shark as I came well out into the ocean. He was more than twenty feet long. Think of that! But they are thirty feet sometimes. His great, fleshy, powerful tail takes him along as he looks from side to side for his prey.
For this purpose he has been compelled to become a fisherman, to manufacture a net. He has succeeded, with some threads from his fragment of a sail, the fibres of his cocoa-nuts, and tough reeds, woven in close meshes; unfortunately those fine fishes, breams, eels and angel-fish, which show themselves so readily through the limpid wave, are not as easy to catch as to see.
The angel-fish, having a very small mouth, must be fished for with a special hook.
Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable growths about it.
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