arrived at the Battery as it had been when he engaged the taxi. In spite of this disappointing state of affairs, following another impulse, he got out, paid the man, and entered the Aquarium.
At first, the tanks of fish, which he had never before inspected, served as a distraction. In turn he examined, not without interest, the white-fish swimming like pale ghosts, the mudfish, with their great sapphire eyes, only elsewhere to be discovered in nature on the wings of gaudy moths, set near the bases of their tails, the bony gar, resembling a dirigible, with its long tawny body, its extensive bony nose, and its under-fins, the great Jewfish, propelling itself fastuously about like a fish of a thousand years, the iridescent grouper, momentarily changing its colour, the green moray, so like a long, live, constantly waving velvet ribbon, the pretty sea-robins, the miraculous angel-fish, with their trusting, doglike eyes, fish that might have been created by Benozzo Gozzoli, and the parrot-fish, saffron and purple and turquoise-blue. It was amusing to watch these scaly creatures, so entirely self-satisfied, nosing around stupidly, displaying their vulgarly brilliant fins and turbine tails with complacency and pride, seeking flies and crumbs and discovering too often only bubbles, the bubbles that ascended incessantly behind the protecting vitrine from the depths of the tanks to the heights, like bright fountains of notes in the music of Ravel. All the paraphernalia here again, Paul thought, for another allegory about
