XII. The Oyster Learns to Swim
Of course no oyster ever did learn to swim, because when he did learn he was no longer an oyster. It looks more as if he once knew how to swim and then forgot. You see his near cousins, the crawfish and the lobster could swim. To swim again he had to turn into something better than an oyster.
You can't imagine him coming out of his shell and turning into a fish, can you? Well, if you had never seen it you could not imagine a perfectly quiet egg coming out of its shell and turning into a beautiful bird; or a plant bursting out of a little brown seed and turning into an apple blossom. But it really wasn't just like that about the oyster and the fish. It was more like fairy fungi turning into a fern. The oyster improved himself into a fish, very, very slowly.
An egg has a shell of lime on the outside. So has the oyster. When the egg hatches the chicken has bones of lime on the inside. When the oyster improved himself into a fish he used the lime of his shell to make inside bones. He already had muscles, a stomach, blood vessels and nerves. But where did he get the idea of a jointed backbone? Where did he get the idea of swimming? Why, all plant and animal life began in the water. Living things were natural born swimmers. The oyster just forgot how. He was a water hermit. The angle or earthworm made ring muscles, and the lobster and crawfish jointed shells. The fish combined these old ideas of nature and made jointed ring bones for a backbone.
Perhaps the oyster got tired of lying as still as a bump on a log. He noticed the crawfish swimming and, inside, the crawfish was not nearly so well made as he. So he ought to be able to swim still better. He wasn't a bit ashamed of learning of his inferiors. So he opened his shell and his mind to his poor relation, Mr. Crawfish.
"Dear Mr. Crawfish," he said—for you can even make a crawfish good-natured and obliging if you call him "Dear Mr.;" "Dear Mr. Crawfish, teach me how to swim."
"Oh, I'm not much of a swimmer," said Mr. Crawfish, "I can only swim backward," for Mr. Crawfish, like the rest of us, is more modest and, in other ways more polite, when he is good-natured. He doesn't feel so boastful as he does when he is in a fighting mood.
