VII. The Earthworm Puts on Armor
You needn't be afraid of him, little friend Earthworm. This armored monster, with his long feelers, his stalk eyes and his great crooked arms with battle axes on the end of them!
"Worse than that," you say, "they're battle scissors!"
So they are, battle scissors. Did I say battle axes?
Well, you needn't be afraid of him, anyhow. He doesn't do half the good in the world that you do. You help make the soil that grows things to eat, while he goes swaggering around—this fierce Mr. Crawfish, and his fiercer big brother, Mr. Lobster—fussing and fighting, and tearing into pieces everything they can lay their scissors on.
We're not afraid of them, are we? "Booh, Mr. Crawfish! Booh, Mr. Lobster!" We'll show them they're only worms, after all.
Why, just look at your insides, Mr. Crawfish. You needn't try to hide them under your jointed armor. We can see right through you!
See that tube running from his stomach to the end of his tail? If that tube didn't swell out into a stomach at one end, and if it wasn't inside of such a queer, armored man-of-war, wouldn't you say he was simply an earthworm? The earthworm lives on very simple breakfast food, the earth he burrows in, and he doesn't need a big stomach to keep it in until it is digested, as the crawfish does; so he doesn't have such a stomach. The earthworm's food passes right through him and digests all the way down—tastes good all the way down, too, very likely, for he doesn't have any special tongue to taste with, either.
But the crawfish and the lobster and all their near relations, eat various things. They eat little fish, scales and all; pieces of each other, shell and all, when they get to fighting, for they are cannibals. So, having many different and very tough things to grind up and digest in their stomachs, they must have a big, strong mill to do it with. Like all fighting animals, they are large eaters. When men spent much of their time in fighting, they spent the most of the rest of it in eating strong meats and drinking strong drinks—which made them want to fight still more. And so they went from bad to worse, just as the crawfish and the lobster do, and died, at last, "with their boots on." Few of the lobsters die in their beds.
