to be a larger boy, and go swimming in the same river with Mr. Crawfish.
Those big front pinchers are called "claw feet." As he has two little feelers and two big feelers, so Mr. Crawfish has two big pincher feet and two smaller ones. He uses these pincher legs and arms to walk with, to fight with and to eat with.
Of course it's ill-bred to fight; and so, as we might expect, Mr. Crawfish has very bad table manners. When he finds something to eat he just "gobbles" it down as fast as he can. He does this partly because he never sits down at the table with other little crawfish and learns to say:
"May I help you to this, and this?" Or, "Do have some more of that."
He hunts his food all alone. He eats it all alone. He crowds it into his lonely mouth as fast as he can. He does this because he hasn't learned to think of anybody's appetite but his own. And then he's always afraid some bigger crawfish will come along and take it away from him!
"Claws were made before knives and forks," says the crawfish and the lobster, and they tear up their food as much as they can before they poke it into their jaws.
To us the crawfish seems a good deal mixed up. For instance, he not only has jaws on his second pair of legs, but at the upper end of this second pair of legs are his gills. Now the gills of a water animal, as you know, are his lungs.
Oh, no; you mustn't think that Mr. Crawfish carries his lungs around outside of him, as you carry your school books, swung ovef your shoulder. He's got a nice place to keep his lungs where he will not strike them with his great awkward arms and legs. There is a groove running back from each side of his mouth to two roomy places on each side of his body under his great back shield. In these two rooms he keeps his lungs.
And did you ever!—he uses his third set of legs to help himself breathe. It is as if, in order to breathe, you had to keep scooping up handfuls of air and pouring it into your lungs. For, these legs have little scoops, or bailers, on them that scoop the water up and pour it over his gills. You see he must have fresh water for his lungs all the time, just as you must have fresh air for yours; only his fresh air is in the water itself. When he is moving—eating, or strolling along the sandy shore, as the walrus and the carpenter did—these
