It seemed to him the incarnation of evil, and those horrible, bulging, merciless eyes stuck like burrs in his memory.
One day, when he had been watching the cauldron, and filling his tin dipper at the freshwater pools, as he came to descend the black wall leading to the valley of rocks, he witnessed a little tragedy.
Down below, on the edge of the pool where the octopus dwelt, a silly young cormorant was standing gazing into the water, so fascinated with something it saw there that it forgot even to jerk its head in search of understanding.
Gard stood and watched.

He saw a tiny pale worm-like thing come creeping up the black rock on which the cormorant squatted.

The cormorant saw it too, and he was hungry, as all cormorants always are, even after a full meal.

So presently he made a jab at it with his curved beak, and in a moment the pale worm had twisted itself tightly round his silly neck, and dragged him screaming and fluttering under the water.
Another day, when he was coming down by the break in the cliff, where some great winter wave had bitten out such a slice that the top had come tumbling down, he saw the monster sunning itself on the flat rock by the side of its pool, like a huge nightmare spider.
The moment he appeared its great eyes settled on his as though it had been waiting only for him.

And when he stopped, with a feeling of shuddering discomfort at its hugeness--for its body seemed considerably over a foot in width, while its arms lounging over the rocks were each at least six feet long, and looked horribly muscular--he could have sworn that one of the great devil-eyes winked familiarly at him, as though the beast would say, "Come on, come on! Nice day for a bathe! Just waiting for you!" He could see the loathsome body move as it breathed, swinging comfortably in the support of its arms.
In a fury of repulsion he stooped to pick up a rock, but when he hurled it the last tentacle was just sliding into the pool, and it seemed to him that it waved an ironical farewell before it disappeared.
More than once fishing-boats hovered about his rock, but kept a safe distance from the boiling underfalls, and he always lay in hiding till they had gone.
But he saw more gracious and beautiful things than these.
As he lay one morning, looking over the ridge at the Sark headlands shining in the sun--with a strong west wind driving the waves so briskly that, Sark-like, they tossed their white crests into the air in angry expostulation long before they met the rocks, and went roaring up them in dazzling spouts of foam--his eye lighted on a gleam of unusual colour on the racing green plain.