280 THE CRAB AND THE BAILLIE. 



they are hardly regarded for any other purpose than 

 as bait for the white fishery. The official personage 

 was a man of leisure, and one favourite way of filling up 

 that leisure was the capture of crabs, which after much 

 care he had learned to do, by catching them in the 

 holes of the rocks, so adroitly as to avoid their formi- 

 dable pincers. One day he had stretched himself on 

 the top of a rock, and thrusting his arm into a crevice 

 below, got hold of a very large crab, so large, indeed, 

 that he was unable to get it out in the position in which 

 it had been taken. Shifting his position in order to 

 accommodate the posture of the prey to the size of the 

 aperture, he slipped his hold of the crab, which imme- 

 diately made reprisals by catching him by the thumb, 

 and squeezing with so much violence, that he roared 

 aloud. But though there be a vulgar opinion, of course 

 an unfounded one, that lobsters are apt to cast their 

 claws through fear at the sound of thunder or of great 

 guns, the thundering and shouting of the corporation- 

 man had no such effect upon the crab. He would 

 gladly have left it to enjoy its hole ; but it would not 

 quit him, but held him as firmly as if he had been in 

 a vice ; and though he rattled it against the rocks with 

 all the power that he could exert, which, pinched as 

 he was by the thumb, was not great, yet he was unable 

 to get out of its clutches. But " tide waits for no 

 man," even though his thumb should be in a crab's 

 claw ; and so the flood returned, till the greater part 

 of the arm was in water, and the ripple even beginning 

 to mount to the top of the rock, which, as the tides 

 were high at that particular time, was speedily to be 

 at least a fathom under water, and destruction seemed 



