still evening air, and when the last clash of the hideous
uproar had died away among the distant hills, the unfeeling brute, now
in a state of collapse from loss of breath, gasped out:--"What, me give
up the only chance of saving myself from that scoundrel of a lobster who
only let me go on my promising to secure him something for supper a
little less hard than myself! Well," continued the crab, "that's a good
'un, that is. My good chap you must be quite out of your senses. Why,
not only will I hand over the baby oyster to the lobster, but I intend
also to have my supper off that tough old idiot of a whelk, who reckons
he's going to get off scot-free, and old mother blue point, too, if I
can find her," and then, as an afterthought, "and you, old marrow-bones,
wouldn't make half a bad tit-bit if I could get hold of you," and he
made a horrid dash at me as he spoke. However, I easily evaded him, and
from a safer distance argued the matter out with him in the following
way:--

'"Allow me, my dear crustacean, to put the matter to you in this light.
Now, first of all, clear your mind of all unnecessary bias. Suppose,"
said I, "that you were to change places with the young oyster, suppose,
we'll say, that you had the near prospect of being devoured by the
greedy lobster. How would you feel, I say, if your neighbour not only
refused to exert himself in any way to extricate you from your
predicament, but also gloried in being the main cause of the disaster
that threatened you?"

[Illustration: AND KILLED IT ON THE SPOT]

'The wily scoundrel merely replied, "Ask me another," and with his left
eye-stalk bent towards the ground, insolently winked at me with the
other. Despairing of penetrating his tough shell with kindly
suggestions, I temporised with him, and succeeded in persuading him to
desist from his evil intentions until I had talked it over with the
lobster. Out of sheer perversity the crab directed me wrongly, but in
good time, after some wandering here and there, I discovered the
lobster.

'I pleaded my case to him as eloquently as I had already done to the
others,--nay, even more eloquently, being, no doubt, a little more used
to it by now, but yet with no apparent good result. The wary creature
pretended ignorance. "To which crab do you refer?" said he, in a
questioning tone; "I have so much business with crustaceans in one way
and another that you would be surprised to learn how confused I become
in my dealings