f barnacles, and common but
kindred anemones with which the stuck-up sea cucumber was too proud to
associate.

Naturally enough, Miss Nellie was delighted with her capture, and, she
tenderly bore him home in triumph to be added to her extensive marine
collection, which had now increased so considerably, that her aunt
declared laughingly that she would have to build a room especially to
contain it presently, her house not being big enough for the purpose.

"Rubbish!" the Captain had called her first attempt at collecting, but,
since then, she had learnt something under the instruction of the old
sailor and displayed greater discrimination in the objects of her zeal;
although still, perhaps, inclined to err in the matter of quantity over
quality, leaning fondly, as most enthusiasts do, to common things.

Not only was the album which her aunt had given her pasted as full as it
could hold of different sorts of seaweed, known and unknown alike to Bob
and herself; but she had a pile of shells big enough to build a rockery.

In addition to these, her accumulation of pet specialities included a
seven-fingered starfish, which is supposed by the ignorant to be
peculiarly inimical to the adventurous cat that swalloweth it; and a
ring-horned pandalus or `Aesop prawn,' which queer creature Master Bob
appropriately christened `The Prawnee Chief,' much to the annoyance of
Miss Nell, who had become quite grand now in her language, becoming
`puffed up,' as Bob said, with her newly-acquired `knowledge'--a
`little' of which, as the proverb tells us, is "a dangerous thing."

The Aesop prawn, by the way, gained the prefix to his name from having a
hump on his back like the Phrygian slave, the fabulist. He is, also,
distinguished by the most exquisite little rings or bands of scarlet,
which seem to encircle his body; but the picturesque effect is really
produced by his antennae, which the pandalus has the happy knack of
arranging round his little person in the most graceful fashion.

Beyond these rarities, precious above price, Nellie had gathered a
quantity of cuttle-fish `bone,' as it is erroneously called, sufficient
to have supplied Bob and herself for a lifetime with ink-erasers--a
purpose for which it is generally employed.

The substance, however, is not really `bone,' but is composed of thin
layers of the purest white chalk, which, when the cuttle-fish is living,
is embedded in the body of the animal, running through its entir