"No, it is nothing at all; and if they were poisonous, how should we eat them? I split a piece of popweed, and put it on like a thimble, and that stops the bleeding immediately. It is not the first time they have given me a rasp. My dear mother likes me to wear gloves, whenever I go shrimping; but I always pull them off. I like to feel things, with my own hands. There, what a fuss about nothing! Now go on. How wonderfully fortune favours you! I have heard it so often, and now I can see it. Try that corner, there is always something there. Roly caught a fine silver mullet there, last summer; and I caught a little fish, we didn't knew the name of." "Let me try to smile nicely," I said to myself; "I always get the best luck when I smile. Cause and effect are always hugging one another. To doubt one's luck, is to doubt it nearly always. I want to impress her with my good luck, for what impression is more favourable? Faint heart never won fairy prawns. That corner looks full of miraculous draught." "Oh, please to let go--let go, Miss Twentifold! He may pull me in, but he mustn't pull in you." For seeing me engaged with a mighty adversary, my lovely companion rushed forward, and put fair hands on the pole of the net, because my light figure was thrown off its balance, by an unexpected weight and force. "Whatever it is, you shall have all the glory," she answered, as she obeyed me; "only I was afraid you were tumbling in." "So I will, if it is needful. I don't mean to let him go," I exclaimed, as I set my heels firmly in a ledge. "Here he comes! What in the world have we caught?" "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.