“‘One morning, as I was poking about among the seaweed and stuff, I came across a fine-looking bunch of pearl-shells. I made a grab at them, but they were firmly rooted and refused to come away. I laid down my handspike, took hold of the cluster with both hands, and shifted my foothold so as to get a good chance to pull.
“‘Up came the bunch of shells at the first wrench, much more readily than I had expected. To recover myself I took a step backward; down went my foot into a crevice, “slumped” into something soft, and snap! my leg was fast in a grip that almost made me yell there in the little prison of my helmet.
“‘Well, as you may imagine, just as soon as I recovered from the start this gave me, I reached out for my handspike to knock that clam-shell into flinders. But a cold shiver went over me as I found I could not reach the weapon! As I laid it down, it had slipped a little off to one side; and there it rested about a foot out of my reach, reclining on one of those twisted conch-shells such as the farmers use for dinner-horns.
“‘How I jerked on my leg trying to pull it out of the trap! That, however, only hurt the leg. All the satisfaction I could get was in the thought that my foot, with its big, twenty-pound, rubber-and-lead boot, must be making the clam’s internal affairs rather uncomfortable. After I had pretty well tired myself out, stretching and tugging on my leg, and struggling to reach the handspike, I paused to recover my wind, and consider the situation.
“‘It was not very deep water I was working in, and there was any amount of light. You have no sort of idea, until you have been there yourself, what a queer world it is down where the pearl-oyster grows. The seaweeds were all sorts of colors—or rather, I should say, they were all sorts of reds and yellows and greens. The rest of the colors of the rainbow you might find in the shells which lay around under foot, or went crawling among the weeds; and away overhead darted and flashed the queerest looking fish, like birds in a yellow sky. There were lots of big anemones too, waving, stretching, and curling their many-colored tentacles.
“‘I saw everything with extraordinary vividness about that time, as I know by the clear way I recollect it now; but you may be sure I wasn’t thinking much just then about the beauties of nature. I was trying to think of some way of getting assistance from Larry. At length I concluded I had better give him the signal to haul me up. Finding that I was stuck, he would, I reasoned, hoist the anchor, and then pull the boat along to the place of my captivity. Then he could easily send me down a hatchet wherewith to chop my way to freedom.
“‘Just as I had come to this resolve, a black shadow passed over my head, and I looked up quickly. It was a big turtle. I didn’t like this, I can tell you; but I kept perfectly still, hoping the new-comer would not notice me.
“‘He paddled along very slowly, with his queer little head stuck far out, and presently he noticed my air-tube. It seemed to strike him as decidedly queer. My blood fairly turned to ice in my veins as I saw him paddle up and take hold of it in a gingerly fashion with his beak. Luckily, he didn’t seem to think it would be good to eat; but I knew that if he should bite it I would be a dead man in about a minute, drowned inside my helmet like a rat in a hole. It is in an emergency like this that a man learns to know what real terror is.
“It seemed to strike Him as decidedly Queer.”—Page 140.