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Aleck had left the whitewashed cottages behind, along with the last traces of busy human life in the shape of boat, rope, spar, lobster-pot, and net, to reach one of the most rugged and inaccessible parts of the rocky cliffs a spot all jagged, piled-up rift with the corresponding hollows and at last selected a place which looked like the beginning of one of the chasms where Nature had commenced a huge gaping crack a good hundred feet in depth, though its darkened wedge-shaped bottom was still quite a hundred feet above where the waves swayed in and out at the bottom, of the cliff.
"Contrary to all the laws of bon-camaraderie, you stole away last night, leaving your unprotected friend in the hands of the enemy. And for what? for the sake of a few hours' ignominious oblivion! Look at me I have not been to bed all night, and I am as lively as a lobster in a lobster-pot." "How did you get home?" I asked, rubbing my eyes; "and when?"
What is that thing on the bottom, there?" said William, pointing in the direction. "That is a sea crawfish, quite as good eating as a lobster. I wonder if I could make a lobster-pot; we should catch plenty, and very good they are." "And what are those little rough things on the rock?"
After Tom slipped away into the water again, he could not help thinking of Ellie, and longed to have her to play with, for he had not succeeded in finding any other water-babies. But soon he had something else to think of. One day he helped a lobster caught in a lobster-pot to get free; and then, five minutes after, he came upon a real live water-baby, sitting on the white sand.
"A lobster-pot is weighted with bricks and it's a heavy load to pull up in a boat. It's an awkward thing to handle, too. Then a lobsterman has to rebait his traps, and as he does that with rotten fish, it's not a sweet job. And he can only bring in lobsters over a certain size; anything less than nine and a half inches in length he has to throw back.
His eyes were on the shifting green waves. "I never put down a net nor a lobster-pot that I didn't see 'em bein' chewed up or knocked to pieces. I'd see a shark a-swimmin' right through a big hole rip-p tear. I could see it as plain as if I was down there under the water all kind o' green and cool, and things swimmin' through it.
Once, in the China seas, his men grew mutinous, said the ship was "leaking like a lobster-pot," and straightway put her about for Singapore; swore they did not care what the skipper thought in fact, would like to talk to him a bit. The skipper was below when the first mate brought down the news and a very pale face as well. "Tell the men to muster!"
"Don't you know that?" he said. "Those are lobster-pot buoys." "You mean there's a lobster-pot attached to every one of those?" "Yes, of course." "But there are thousands of them! Why, right now, I can probably see forty or fifty, and they're not so awfully easy to catch sight of with a little sea running. And why are they painted all different colors?"
The danger of losing her way back never suggested itself. She had not learned that the look of things as you go, is not their look when you turn to go back; that with your attitude their mood will have altered. Nature is like a lobster-pot: she lets you easily go on, but not easily return. When she gained the summit of the second ridge, she looked abroad on a country of which she knew nothing.
People continually say that to me; but I tell them, if they don't know that fire burns, that is no reason that it should not burn you; and if you don't know that dirt breeds fever, that is no reason why the fevers should not kill you. The lobster did not know that there was any harm in getting into the lobster-pot; but it caught him all the same." "Dear me," thought Tom, "she knows everything!"
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