Water conveys sound, as every country
boy knows who has tried the experiment of diving to the bottom of
the swimming-hole and knocking two big stones together. But I doubt
whether any country boy, engaged in this interesting scientific
experiment, has heard the conversation of his friends on the bank
who were engaged in hiding his clothes.
There are many curious and more or less venerable stories to the
effect that fishes may be trained to assemble at the ringing of a
bell or the beating of a drum. Lucian, a writer of the second
century, tells of a certain lake wherein many sacred fishes were
kept, of which the largest had names given to them, and came when
they were called. But Lucian was not a man of especially good
reputation, and there is an air of improbability about his statement
that the LARGEST fishes came. This is not the custom of the largest
fishes.
In the present century there was a tale of an eel in a garden-well,
in Scotland, which would come to be fed out of a spoon when the
children called him by his singularly inappropriate name of Rob Roy.
This seems a more likely story than Lucian's; at all events it comes
from a more orthodox atmosphere. But before giving it full
credence, I should like to know whether the children, when they
called "Rob Roy!" stood where the eel could see the spoon.
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