“But I’ve the best voice,” said the tiger-shell; it is called tiger-shell because it looks like a panther.
“Oh! tut, tut!” said the common garden-snail, “I’m more in demand than any other snail in the world; you’ll find me all over the flower-beds in the summer, and in the winter I lie in the wood-shed in a cabbage tub. They call me uninteresting, but they can’t do without me.”
“What dreadful creatures they are,” thought Victor, “they think of nothing but blowing their own trumpets”; and to while away the time he took up a book which lay on the counter. As he had learned to use his eyes, he saw at a glance that it opened at page 240 and that chapter 51 began at the top of the left-hand side, and had for a motto a verse written by Coleridge, the gist of which struck him like a flash of lightning. With burning cheeks and bated breath he read... I’ll tell you what he read later on, but I may admit at once that it had nothing whatever to do with snails.
Victor liked the shop and sat down at a little distance from the cash-box, the immediate vicinity of which is never without a certain risk. He began to ponder over all the queer animals which went down to the sea as he did; he was sure that they could not find it too warm at the bottom of the sea and yet they perspired; and whenever they perspired chalk, it immediately became a new house. They wriggled like worms, some to the right and some to the left; it was clear that they had to wriggle in some direction and, of course, they could not all turn to the same side.
All at once a voice came from the other side of the green curtain which separated the shop from the back parlour.
“Yes, we know all that,” shouted the voice, “but what we don’t know is this: the cockle of the ear belongs to the species of the Helix, and the little bones near the drum are exactly like the animal in Limnaeus stagnalis, and that’s printed in a book.”
Victor, who realised at once that the voice belonged to a thought-reader, shouted back brutally, but without showing the least surprise:—
“We know all that, but why we should have a Helix in our ears is as unknown to the book as to the dealer in snails—”
“I’m not a dealer in snails,” bellowed the voice behind the curtain.
“What are you, then?” Victor bellowed back.