TRAPPED BY A LOBSTER

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1640, 12 May 1925, Page 3

TRAPPED BY A LOBSTER

Mr L. R. Brightwell describes in the Wide World Magazine a terrible experience that befel an attendant in a public aquarium. "A year or two before the war," he v rites, "a lobster in the Amsterdam Aquarium brought a young and somewhat diminutive keeper as near the giave as any man can well go without actually entering it. The keeper concerned had emptie.l the water from a lobster tank, and was gathering the exhibits into a sack with a view to removing them to fresh quarters. All went well until Che youth, eager to finish the job, incautiously thrust his hand into a hollow of the mockery and seized a huge old lobster by the Caw. Man and crustacean promptly joined in a tragic handshake. The lobster seized the man by three fingers (afterwards amputated) and held on. The keeper's cries for help rang through the deserted aquarium, but without result, and presently he realised that he must wait an hour or more ere his colleagues on night duty returned from their tea. Half-an-hour went by, and then it began to dawn, on the wretched man that his plight was far worse than he had at first thought. "One of the taps employed to fill the tank had defective washers, and began to drip The drip increased to a steady trickle, and the trickle to a full-throated outpouring of water that steadily filled the tank until the water ; stood just below the keeper's chin. The j flood rose inexorably until relief ar-; rived. Then, as speedily as might be, J the tap was plugged, the tank drained, j rockery and lobster demolished with ] pickaxe and crowbar, and a half j drowned, temporarily insane man rescued from as horrible a death as the most morbid imagination could well conceive."