ere, in the clear water,
half-hidden by a shelf of rock, he could see what at first made him
start, for it looked like an enormous flat spider lying about three feet
down, watching him with a couple of eyes like small peas, mounted,
mushroom-fashion, on a stalk.

"Why, it's an old crab," he said; "only a small one, though. Ugh! what
a disgusting-looking beast!"

He remained watching the crab for some few minutes, and then looked
straight along the line, which washed up and down on a piece of rock as
the waves came softly in, bearing that peculiar sea-weedy scent from the
shore. Then he had another look at the crab, and could distinctly see
its peculiar water-breathing apparatus at work, playing like some piece
of mechanism about its mouth, while sometimes one claw would be raised a
little way, then another, as if the mollusc were sparring at Arthur, and
asking him to come on.

"Ugh! the ridiculous-looking little monster!" he muttered. "I wonder
how long they'll be! What a while it is before I get a bite!"

But he did not get a bite all the same. For, in the first place, there
were none but very small fish in and about the rocks--little wrasse, and
blennies wherever the bottom was sandy, and tiny crabs scuffling in and
out among the stones, where jelly-fish were opening and shutting and
expanding their tentacles in search of minute food.

In the second place, Arthur sat on fishing, happily unconscious of the
fact that he was in a similar position to the short-sighted old man in
the caricature. This individual is by a river side comfortably seated
beneath a tree, his rod horizontally held above the water, but his line
and float, where he has jerked them, four or five feet above his head in
an overhanging bough.

There were no overhanging boughs near Arthur, and no trees; but when he
threw in his line the lead had gone into a rock-pool, the hook had
stopped in a patch of sea-weed on a rock high and dry, and the bait of
squid was being nicely cooked and frizzled in the sun.

"I think it wants a new bait," said our fisherman at last very
importantly; and, drawing in the line, the lead came with a bump up
against the side of the boat, while the bait was dragged through the
water, and came in thoroughly wet once more.

"I thought so," said Arthur complacently as he examined the shrunken
bait. "Something has been at it and sucked all the goodness away. I
wish that fisher-boy was here to put on a fresh one."