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 THE WILD MAN

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?"

'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 173