Very soon light reappeared and grew, and, the sun being low on the horizon, the refraction edged the different objects with a spectral ring.

At ten yards and a half deep, we walked amidst a shoal of little fishes of all kinds, more numerous than the birds of the air, and also more agile; but no aquatic game worthy of a shot had as yet met our gaze, when at that moment I saw the Captain shoulder his gun quickly, and follow a moving object into the shrubs.

He fired; I heard a slight hissing, and a creature fell stunned at some distance from us.

It was a magnificent sea-otter, an enhydrus, the only exclusively marine quadruped.

This otter was five feet long, and must have been very valuable.