High up on the sands, and close to the late dining-room, lay a number of white, flat substances, which puzzled Henry as much as the purse of the skate had done. They were oval in shape, and about the size of his foot. One side was hard and rough, the other smoother, and soft enough to be scratched by the finger-nail. Whether they were bones or shells he could not tell. “This,” said Mr. Miller, “is the backbone of a cuttle-fish. The animal, when alive, is soft, and nearly transparent. It has a large head, on which there are a number of long arms stretching out. It lives on small fish, which it chases, and then catches hold of by the help of many small suckers on its arms. When chased itself, it spurts out a quantity of black fluid, like ink, making the water so thick and dark that its enemy loses sight of it, and is obliged to give up the chase. Often, when I have been fishing from a boat, a cuttle-fish has followed a fish which I have caught, up to the very surface of the water, and sometimes I have caught the cuttle-fish itself, by darting into it a hook fastened to the end of a stick.
CUTTLE-FISH AND EGGS.
“I was once fishing, when the man in the boat with me caught a cuttle-fish in this way, and having lifted it into the boat too soon, it spurted its ink with such force as to spatter us all over. It is not used as food in this country, but it makes excellent bait.”
Scattered along the coast were a number of scarlet berries, which Mr. Miller looked at very closely, and said they were cranberries.
“But do cranberries grow on sea-weeds?” said Henry.
“No,” replied Mr. Miller, “certainly not; and I can only account for their being here by supposing that some ship from America must have been lost at sea during the late gale, and that these berries must have formed part of her cargo. You remember how dreadfully we heard the wind howling on Christmas Eve. It was a sad Christmas to many a poor sailor, who hoped, perhaps, to spend it among his friends on shore; friends, alas! whom he will now never meet again. See, here is something else which must have come from a ship.”
This was a small lump of spermaceti, a substance which is obtained from a kind of whale found in the Arctic regions. It had neither taste nor smell, and looked exactly like a piece of camphor.
“Look!” said Henry, as he picked up something; “here is a curious piece of wood full of holes, like the stone which we found the other day.”
