Page:Bedford-Jones--Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril.djvu/133

 First one and then another of the around began "reminiscing."

"This is the first one I ever seen in these parts," declared one fisherman, "though somebody or the other tells me every summer they's spied one. Say, them varmints can chaw up a fish net same as a spider web." "And they ain't squeamish about their mess, neither," quoth Cap*n Buffum. "In the tropics I heard tell of one that was landed and sliced, and in his belly they lit on a lady's workbox, with pins and needles and scissors and all them other jimcracks that women folks cuts up with."

The crowd applauded this as a genuine whopper.

"And I've seen 'em," said another traveled seaman, "thirty-seven feet long, and that's no sea yarn; and they could flip over a rowboat same as I could a splinter."

"Recollec' that sucker that turned up on the Jersey coast a summer or two ago and chawed up a kid in, swimmin'?" said a third.

"When I was learnin' this hydroplane game on the Florida coast," related Turner, "one of my chums topped in the sea, and by the time we