silver-sand down there, under the sink, Stubbins. Just hand it
up to me, will you?"

In a few moments we had the pan all shiny and bright and the
sausages were put over the kitchen-fire and a beautiful frying
smell went all through the house.

While the Doctor was busy at the cooking I went and took another
look at the funny little creature swimming about in the glass
jar.

"What is this animal?" I asked.

"Oh that," said the Doctor, turning round--"that's a Wiff-Waff.
Its full name is hippocampus Pippitopitus. But the natives just
call it a Wiff-Waff--on account of the way it waves its tail,
swimming, I imagine. That's what I went on this last voyage for,
to get that. You see I'm very busy just now trying to learn the
language of the shellfish. They HAVE languages, of that I feel
sure. I can talk a little shark language and porpoise dialect
myself. But what I particularly want to learn now is shellfish."

"Why?" I asked.

"Well, you see, some of the shellfish are the oldest kind of
animals in the world that we know of. We find their shells in
the rocks--turned to stone--thousands of years old. So I feel
quite sure that if I could only get to talk their language, I
should be able to learn a whole lot about what the world was like
ages and ages and ages ago. You see?"