I might have gone back to give a fuller account of that famous Iormungandur, the great sea serpent, which still exists in our days--who dares doubt it? The crew of an English vessel, passengers, {419}officers, and sailors, have unanimously testified in a legally drawn up deposition that they have met it quite recently in the Northern seas. What more evidence do you want? And the _Kraken_, that most marvelous of all cetaceans, which could easily be mistaken for a habitable island, and on which imprudent navigators once really landed, erecting their tents and saying mass, without its ever stirring, until they hoisted anchors, when the animal for the first time gave signs of life? And the _Griffins_, those perfect symbols of avarice, who are all the time busily engaged in dragging forth from underground vast heaps of gold and precious stones, merely in order to guard and defend them ever afterwards, at the peril of their lives, although the gold and the jewels are of no use to any one? And Sleipner, Odin’s _eight-legged horse_, and the dog _Garm_, etc? Passing on to another variety of zoological marvels, I might have mentioned the _Salmon,_ whose scaly skin wicked Loki assumed as a disguise in order to escape from the wrath of the gods after Balder’s death. And that marvelous _Sturgeon_ in the Rhine, which the French legends have put to good profit. Let us pause a moment in contemplation of this wonderful fish. A young, noble lady determined, in order to save {420}her honor, to destroy her beauty, the grandest, most heroic, and most calamitous sacrifice that can possibly be made. Hence, when the moment for action arrived, her courage failed her. But if she could not bear the idea of becoming ugly, she could at least mutilate herself. So she puts her dagger upon the ledge of a window which overlooked the Rhine, seizes a hatchet, and with a single blow cuts off her hand, which falls into the river, and then with the bleeding stump terrifies her infamous persecutor. Here the sturgeon makes its appearance. This providential sturgeon has seen the hand drop into the river; it swallows it with well-known voracity, but in the anticipation of restoring it, seven years later, uninjured to the true owner, and thus to prove her superhuman virtue. And this really happened seven years after the occurrence in Rome, in the presence of the Pope and his assembled Cardinals. At first sight it does not appear quite clear, how the sturgeon could have passed from the waters of the Rhine into those of the Tiber, but in this kind of stories there is no use in trying to comprehend everything.