£78 
LITTLE FOLKS 
HUGGED TO DEATH. 
Can you imagine how a spider would look five feet high ? 
"Ugh!" did you say? Well, you'd say it louder and more 
emphatically if you could see the creature that looks like a spider 
when he takes a promenade on the bottom of the sea. You can 
see in the picture that he's no beauty, but fancy him walking on 
the tips of those eight horrid arms — or legs — of his, with his head 
hanging down. 
I'm sure I'm glad he has to stay in 
the ocean, and can't come up on land, 
for I have no wish to see him. It's bad 
enough to read about him. He i§n't 
obliged to walk ; he can swim, by open- 
ing and shutting his arms, and contract- 
ing and expanding his body, or he can 
climb the rocks as a fly can climb a wall, 
with perfect ease. He is called by fish- 
ermen a Mansucker, though in the books 
! his name is Octopus. 
He is an odd looking creature. In 
the centre is a round body, nearly all 
mouth, armed with a pair of mandibles 
like the bill of a parrot. Sticking out every way from his body, 
like the rays of a star, are eight horrible arms. These arms are flat 
and tough like leather; indeed, the whole creature has hardly a bone 
in him. There are three rows of suckers the whole length of each 
arm ; as many as a thousand in one Octopus. 
Some of the suckers are as large as an egg-cup. When he 
seizes anything with his arm, every sucker fastens itself tightly to 
the victim, and there's no way to get them off, but to cut off the 
arm itself. 
His eyes — which stick out — are large and yellow, and have a 
very ugly expression. He changes color when excited, and he 
carries bags of ink, with which he can discolor the water all around. 
If he loses an arm, he don't have any trouble about it, for another 
one grows out. 
