With the purpose of testing the swimming powers of an octopus, and making other observations connected with its mode of progression through the water, I experimented with one in one of the store tanks at Brighton. I had put him through his paces, and brought him back to the starting-post several times after he had swum to the further end of the tank, and at last the creature became irritated. Instead of sinking to the bottom as he had previously tried to do, he swam along the surface away from me till he reached the back of the tank, where he sustained himself motionless for an instant, and then shot forth a jet of water which struck me on the breast, and drenched my shirt-front, though I was five feet distant from him. I have known of many amusing instances of this squirting of water or ink by the cuttle-fish startling the victim of it by its unexpected suddenness. My deceased friend Tom Hood, unaware of this propensity of the animal, hastened to lay hold of one which he had hooked in Looe Harbour, and, receiving its _jet d’eau_ full in his face, exclaimed that “he did not exactly know what he had on his line, but he thought he had caught a young garden engine.” Fishermen, when catching squid as bait, haul them up slowly until they are nearly at the surface of the water, and then “gaff” them by the tail, and hold them at some distance from the boat, to allow them to discharge their ink. The Rev. J. G. Wood mentions an incident of a naval officer’s white-duck trousers being “de-decorated” with the liquid missile of a cuttle; the aggrieved individual asserting that it took deliberate aim for that purpose. During a Saturday night’s chat with some Sussex fishermen with whom I had often before held pleasant conversation on matters appertaining to their craft, cuttle-fishes, sometimes called by sailors “ink-spewers,” were mentioned, and one of the party related the following adventure of a shipmate who was present. I must tell it in his own language.