Along the shore now take your stand,
With a bit of fish-line in your hand!
At one end of the fish-line tie on this piece of periwinkle meat. Ugh! It is not nice I know, but you must not be too nice when you go crabbing. The boys must look after the girls and see that their lines are all right. Now—have you plenty of elbow room? Is the bait tied on so that it cannot get off? Then swing the line and throw it so that the bait falls well out into the creek. Now wait—and hold on to the other end of your line. Do you feel a jerk? a pull? Then haul in very slowly, and be ready with the nets, Bob and Tom. Slip the net under the crab as soon as it is near the shore. If you do not it will get away. Look! There is a crab with but one large claw! It broke off the other in trying to get away. A crab will often lose a claw rather than be taken in a net.
See that one dart off under the seaweed! Now we have all that we need. Let us roll up our lines and go home. Look at John, with a crab fast to his coat. Oh! what fun we have had!
PETER’S WORK-SHOP.
Peter is fond of tools. He loves to saw and hammer, and to drive nails. Oh, what a noise he makes! He has a room all to himself in the upper part of the house, and here he spends most of his time on rainy days when he is out of school.
It is handy to have such a boy as Peter around, for if a hinge gets loose, or a piece of board is wanted, there is no need of sending for a carpenter; Peter will attend to it just as well as the best.
Nellie, Dotty, and Susy, bring him their dolls to mend, and sometimes he has so much work of this sort to do that his work-shop looks like a dolls’ hospital. He has a sign upon the wall—“Dolls mended”—and he tries his best to do his work well, and to keep his tools bright.