Imprisoned in the library by the rain while our host was busy elsewhere, the Professor and I had spent the morning rummaging through the shelves. The Professor’s find had been a black-letter treatise on etiquette, in the French of the fifteenth century. I had unearthed from behind a row of tattered magazines what at first sight I had supposed was an empty book-cover, but which had turn out to be an old scrap-album of the kind popular during the first half of the nineteenth century. The album had been begun but never filled up. Its sole contents were a few newspaper cuttings, and the little rice-paper drawing of the goldfish was pasted on the first leaf.
“There is something that strikes me as peculiar about this sketch, but what it is I can hardly say,” I observed as we all three stared at it.
“The mouth is distended in a rather unusual fashion for a carp,” remarked the Professor.
Gilchrist turned to him sharply: “What makes you call it a carp?”
The Professor shrugged his shoulders. “The goldfish is a variety of the carp species,” he replied quietly. “You appear to know that.”
“I know it; but I didn’t think that many other people did.”
“It is a Chinese variety”—the Professor was continuing when I uttered an exclamation. The word China had come to me as a revelation.
“This drawing has come from China!” I proclaimed confidently. “It is not the work of a European.”
Gilchrist nodded.
“Now I understand why it seemed to me that there was something strange about it,” I added.
Excerpted from ‘The Celestial Carp’ by Allen Upward, a short story appearing in The Living Age, volume XIII. Published by the Living Age Company, Boston, 1901.