"A giant of a lobster, a perfect giant!" She was clapping her hands, with delight, as she said it. "Oh, I never beheld such a monster in my life! And there never was any one, with luck like yours. There, anybody else would have lost him but you."
"I don't mean to lose him, if he murders me," I shouted, as I swung him out mightily, and laid hold of him; "oh, he has laid hold of me, in the most inhuman manner! Whatever shall I do, to get out of his clutches?"
For this trenchant radical had nipped me by the wrist, with one mighty claws, and was clutching about with the other, to embrace me somewhere else.
"Oh, Tommy, take care of your nose," she cried, forgetting all formality in fright; "oh, what will your mother say, if you lose your nose? I know an old sailor, who has got the mark now. There, that claw is harmless at any rate. Now let us consider about the other."
She had cleverly pushed a large stone between his unoccupied nippers; but the villain lay stubbornly on his back, in a great tussock of weeds, spreading his long whiskers, and dappled joints, and lashing about the blue fans of his tail, and exerting all the leverage of his body, to drive his toothed fangs through my poor wrist; and if any one else had been there but Laura, I should have roared with the violence of pain.
"Oh, I am so sorry! Oh, how very dreadful! I would not have had it happen, for all the lobsters in the world." As she spoke she knelt by me, and her cheek touched mine, and a shower of her hair came streaming down, so that I could put my lips to it.
"Let him pinch away as hard as he pleases," I exclaimed, "he'll be tired before I am, of this position."
However, it was impossible not to feel, that the position would be better without its drawbacks. Even love's young dream may be sweeter, without nightmare; and painful is the bravest smile of pain. With a quick thought, she ran for the handle of her net, and slipping it out of the socket, entered the taper end in at the heel of the claw, and with the aid of my other hand, unlocked my horny handcuff.