THE OYSTER 



living creature itself; it is a greeny red, globular object, 

 any size from that of a marble to a small orange, and 

 looking exactly like a coiled-up hedgehog. According 

 to the dredger there are three grounds of objection to 

 it ; it pricks the fingers most painfully ; a prick from 

 it is poisonous; it eats the oysters. Nobody who has 

 handled one will cavil at the first statement ; the second 

 is nonsense ; the third open to debate, for zoologists seem 

 to agree that the urchin is a vegetable feeder. It certainly 

 has a trick of getting in the way of the fingers while the 

 brood is being culled, and a pleasant little habit of stick- 

 ing one of its spines between the nail and the flesh and 

 leaving it there. So long as it behaves, the dredger 

 shoots it overboard with the rest; but should it prick 

 him, the bystander will see that the savage is not 

 altogether dead in our fishermen ; for the offending burr 

 must be slowly hammered to death with a stone, or gently 

 dropped into the cabin fire. You might tell the dredger 

 that the urchin does not feel anything, has no evil in- 

 tentions, and was not made by the devil ; and being the 

 naturally courteous fellow that he generally is, he would 

 not contradict you till you were out of hearing. 



Now out through the port-hole are swept the pipe-fishes 

 and sea-mice and the half-dozen or more varieties of crab 

 noticeably the ghastly spider-crab with an avalanche of 

 stones ; and the fisher hauls up his second dredge, empties 

 it, throws it back, and sorts as before. If it is a lucky 

 day with him, after a few such hauls he has filled his 

 pail, emptied it into a larger one and started to fill it 

 again. If you take the trouble to examine the contents 



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