“To be sure,” replied Tom; “but are not their legs provided with some sticky matter, which enables them to preserve themselves from falling?”
“That is a popular error, my dear; the fact is, that their feet are provided with little cups, or suckers, which they alternately exhaust and fill with air; by which means they are enabled to walk in every position, over the most slippery surfaces.[(28)] In like manner, the walrus, or seal, a painting of which you may remember to have seen in the Panorama of Spitzbergen, is capable of climbing the masses of slippery ice with perfect security.”
At this moment, Tom’s stone fell from the sucker. Louisa enquired how it could have happened.
“The circumstance is to be easily explained,” said her father. “The atmosphere, by its pressure, ultimately forced its way through the edges of the sucker; its interior, therefore, became filled with air, and it consequently balanced the external weight, which had before confined it.”
“I think,” said the vicar, “that Tom must now surely understand the theory of the leathern sucker; what say you, my boy? Cannot you exclaim with Persius, ‘Intus et in cute novi.’”
“Which I suppose,” observed Mr. Seymour, “you would construe, ‘Well do I know the nature of the cavity, and the operation of the leather.’”
“Exactly,” answered the vicar.
“Then never more protest against the vice of punning, for a more atrocious specimen of the lusus verborum was never sported by the most incorrigible Johnian: but, to your classical fancy, any object enclosed in a Latin shrine appears as a deity.”
The vicar had just drawn up his person into a suitable attitude for combat, and would, no doubt, have defended himself against this unexpected attack with his usual address, had not a circumstance occurred, which put an abrupt termination to the discourse.
“See! see!” exclaimed Louisa; “what can have happened? There is Jerry Styles, with a crowd of villagers, running towards us in the greatest state of agitation and alarm.”