"Be careful, Mun Bun! Don't fall in!" cried his father, who, having caught up a long-handled net, was now running down a little hill to the pier. "Be careful!" he repeated.
"I will," answered the little boy, shaking his golden hair out of his blue eyes, as he tried to get a better view of what he had caught. "Oh, but he's a big one, and he winks his claws at me!"
"Well, as long as the crab doesn't pinch you you'll be all right," said Daddy Bunker.
There! I meant to tell you before that Mun Bun was catching crabs, and not fish, as you might have supposed at first. He had a long string, with a piece of meat on the end, and he had been dangling this in the water of Clam River, from Cousin Tom's boat pier.
Then a big crab had come along and, catching hold of the chunk of meat in one claw, had tried to swim away with it to eat it in some hole on the bottom of the inlet.
But the string, to which the meat was tied, did not let him. Mun Bun held on to the string and as he slowly pulled it up he caught sight of the crab. As the little fellow had said, it was a big one, and one of the claws was "winkin'" at him. By that Mun Bun meant the crab was opening and closing his claw as one opens and closes an eye.
"Hold him under water, Mun Bun, or he'll let go and drop off," called Daddy Bunker.
"I will," answered the golden-haired boy, and he leaned still farther over the edge of the pier to make sure the crab was still holding to the piece of meat.
"Be careful, Mun Bun!" shouted his father. "Be careful! Oh, there you go!"
And there Mun Bun did go! Right off the pier he fell with a big splash into Clam River. Under the water he went, but he soon came up again, and, having held his breath, as his father had taught him to do whenever his head went under water, Mun Bun, after a gasp or two, was able to cry: