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Meanwhile, throughout that stark battle, what of the youngling’s fate? By almost a miracle, he had passed without scathe. What manner of dread convulsion of Nature was in progress he could not know—he was blind and deaf and almost lifeless with terror. With all that wide ocean around him he knew not whither to flee from this day of wrath. Of all those who had been to him so brief a space ago the living embodiment of invincible might, not one remained to help or shield him, none but were involved in this cataclysm of blood. His kindred were cut off from him, he was overlooked by his enemies, and when he came to himself he was alone. A sudden frantic impulse seized him, and under its influence he fled, fled as the bee flies, but without the homing instinct to guide him, southward through the calm blue silences of that sleeping ocean. On, on, he fled untiring, until behind him the emerald sheen of his passage through the now starlit waters broadened into a wide blaze of softest light. Before him lay the dark, its profound depths just manifested by the occasional transient gleam of a palpitating medusa or the swift flight of a terrified shark. When compelled to break the glassy surface for breath there was a sudden splash, and amid the deep sigh from his labouring lungs came the musical fall of the sparkling spray. When morning dawned again on his long objectless flight, unfailing instinct warned him of his approach to shallower waters, and with slackening speed he went on, through the tender diffused sunlight of those dreamy depths, until he came to an enormous submarine forest, where the trees were fantastic abutments of living coral, the leaves and fronds of dull-hued fucus or algæ, the blossoms of orchid-like sea-anemones or zoophytes, and the birds were darting, gliding fish, whose myriad splendid tints blazed like illuminated jewels.