It was certainly an improvement on the black hole from which he had just escaped. Light came down through the clear water, but a cold, white light, little like the green and gold glimmer that illumined the slow tide in his Caribbean home. The floor about him was not wholly unfamiliar. The stones, the sand, the colored weeds, the shells,--they were like, yet unlike, those from which he had been snatched away. But on three sides there were white, opaque walls, so near that he could have touched them by stretching out a tentacle. Only on the fourth side was there space--but a space of gloom and inexplicable moving confusion from which he shrank. In this direction the floor of sand and stones and weeds ended with a mysterious abruptness; and the vague openness beyond filled him with uneasiness. Pale-colored shapes, with eyes, would drift up, sometimes in crowds, and stare in at him fixedly. It daunted him as nothing else had ever done, this drift of peering faces. It was long before he could teach himself to ignore them. When food came to him,--small fish and crabs, descending suddenly from the top of the water,--at such times the faces would throng tumultuously in that open space, and for a long time the many peering eyes would so disconcert him as almost to spoil his appetite. But at last he grew accustomed even to the faces and the eyes, and disregarded them as if they were so much passing seaweed, borne by the tide. His investigating tentacles had shown him that between him and the space of confusion there was an incomprehensible barrier fixed, which he could see through but not pass; and that if he could not get out, neither could the faces get in to trouble him. Thus, well fed and undisturbed, the octopus grew fairly content in his glass house, and never guessed the stormy life of the great city beyond his walls. For all he knew, his comfortable prison might have been on the shore of one of his own Bahaman Keys. He was undisputed lord of his domain, narrow though it was; and the homage he received from the visitors who came to pay him court was untiring. His lordship had been long unthreatened, when one day, had he not been too indifferent to notice them, he might have seen that the faces in the outer gloom were unusually numerous, the eyes unusually intent. Suddenly there was the accustomed splash in the water above him. That splash had come to him to mean just food, unresisting victims, and his tentacles were instantly alert to seize whatever should come within reach.