Newton!"
"A starfish!" murmured Tom. This accounted for it, and, as he
looked at the monster from closer quarters, he saw that Norton
had spoken the truth.
Small starfish, or even large ones, two feet or more in
diameter, may be seen at the seashore almost any time. Nearly
always the specimens cast up on the beach are in extended form,
either limp, or dead and dried. In almost every instance they
are spread out just as their name indicates, in the conventional
form of a star.
But a starfish alive, and at its business of eating oysters or
other shell animals in the sea, is not at all this shape.
Instead, it assumes the form of a sack, spreading its five
radiating arms around the object of its meal. It then proceeds
to suck the oyster out of its shell, and so powerful a suction
organ has the starfish that he can pull an oyster through its
shell, by forcing the bivalve to open.
And it was a gigantic starfish, a hundred times as large as any
Tom had ever seen, that had Ned in its grip. The creature had
doubtless taken the diver for a new kind of oyster, and was
trying to open it.
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