claimed Mr Sedgwick.

"Wonderfully beautiful!" he exclaimed. "What a prize!" And as if he
were handling the most delicate piece of mechanism, he carefully lifted
the basket into the boat.

"What is it?" I asked. "What can it be?"

"What is it!" exclaimed my uncle. "It is worth coming all the way from
England to obtain, and living out here many years. Why, this is a
perfect nautilus!" With the greatest care he drew out the fragile shell
with the creature inside. "See," he said, "it belongs to the genus
_Cephalapoda_. It is one of the _Polythalamous_, or many-chambered
shells."

"Well, I should call it a big snail of rather a curious shape," observed
Roger Trew.

However, as far as the shape was concerned, it more approached a horn
with the end curled up and placed in the mouth. My uncle said he was
rather doubtful that, when alive, the nautilus did float on the water.
However, he confessed that many naturalists assert that it does so, as
do certainly the people of the coast near which it is found. He told me
that possibly this idea had arisen because the shell, when empty, swims
on the surface. The creature, when at the bottom, crawls along like any
other snail. Sometimes it dies and falls out, when the shell rises to
the surface by means of the gases generated in its chambers; and thus
they are seen floating on the waves. Others say, however, that the
animal itself with the shell, putting out its head and all its
tentacles, spreads them upon the water with the poop of the shell above
it. The light part of the shell rising above the waves is taken for the
sail with which it is said to move over the surface. Numbers are seen
together after a storm, by which it is supposed that they congregate
also at the bottom in troops. They certainly do not sail for any length
of time; but having taken in all their tentacles, they turn over their
boat, and thus once more descend to the bottom.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

OUR HILL-FORT.

It was amusing to see the two naturalists eagerly examining the nautilus
when we brought it in.

"Walter, you have rendered science an important service!" exclaimed Mr
Hooker. "So difficult is this creature to be obtained, that I know of
one only that has ever been brought to England, now preserved in the
Royal College of Surgeons."

Immediately a jar of arrack, which my uncle had brewed for the sake of
preserving his specimens--certainly not for drinking--was produced, an