"But after all, a dogfish is a shark, and aren't sharks the most vicious creatures o' the sea?"
"I shouldn't say so," the old collector answered. "I reckon the moray is really more vicious. He's always huntin' trouble. A shark is always hungry, that's all. Fishes have different kinds o' tempers, you know, an' often it's the smallest creature that's the meanest."
"Common fishes?"
"There isn't anythin' that swims that's meaner than a 'mad-Tom,' an' they're frequent in all the rivers o' the middle west an' south. A 'mad-Tom,'" he continued in answer to the boy's questioning look, "is a small catfish with spines. Most boys in riverside villages have their hands all cut up by 'mad-Toms.' O' course there are scorpion-fish an' toad-fishes in tropical waters, an'
their poison will cripple a man for a while, but there's no fish that's fatal."
"I thought there were lots of poisonous things in the water," Colin said, "jellyfish and other things like that."
"Well," replied the collector, "a jellyfish can be tolerable poisonous. The Portuguese man-o'-war, pretty enough to look at when it floats on the water, with long streamers o' purple threads flowin' out behind, is the only thing that I ever heard of that killed a man."
"A jellyfish? How?"
"It was all his own fault," was the reply. "It was down in the Bahamas, off Nassau, as I remember. The sea was just alive with jellyfish, an' this young fellow that I'm tellin' about, he swam around a good deal an' once or twice had run into a jellyfish without gettin' stung. There's only some o' them that sting."
"I thought all of them did a little?"