by a great black porpoise."

How vexatious! The water-babies close to him, and yet he could not
find one.

And then he left the buoy, and used to go along the sands and round
the rocks, and come out in the night--like the forsaken Merman in
Mr. Arnold's beautiful, beautiful poem, which you must learn by
heart some day--and sit upon a point of rock, among the shining
sea-weeds, in the low October tides, and cry and call for the
water-babies; but he never heard a voice call in return. And at
last, with his fretting and crying, he grew quite lean and thin.

But one day among the rocks he found a playfellow. It was not a
water-baby, alas! but it was a lobster; and a very distinguished
lobster he was; for he had live barnacles on his claws, which is a
great mark of distinction in lobsterdom, and no more to be bought
for money than a good conscience or the Victoria Cross.

Tom had never seen a lobster before; and he was mightily taken with
this one; for he thought him the most curious, odd, ridiculous
creature he had ever seen; and there he was not far wrong; for all
the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful
men, in the world, with all the old German bogy-painters into the
bargain, could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into
one, anything so curious, and so ridiculous, as a lobster.

He had one claw knobbed and the other jagged; and Tom delighted in
watching him hold on to the seaweed with his knobbed claw, while he
cut up salads with his jagged one, and then put them into his