CHAPTEH X. 



Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay, 

 With fry innumerable swarm : . . . . 



part single or with mate 

 Graze the sea-weed their pasture, and through groves 

 Of coral stray ; or, sporting with quick glance, 

 Show to the sun their waved coats dropp'd with gold. 



Milton. 



THE TRUMPET LUCERNAEIA. 



The summer was over, but I still lingered at Wey- 

 mouth. Spring-tides came and went with tantalizing 

 regularity ; but, though the sea receded far below the 

 lowest level reached in summer, it was almost unavail- 

 able to me. Day after day I used to go down and 

 look upon the ledges, but fierce autumnal gales blew 

 with characteristic violence and pertinacity, and huge 

 seas rolled in, sweeping over the flats, shooting up in 

 forcible jets from the fissures, and laying bare for a 

 moment large tracts of inviting sea-weeds, only to 

 cover them the next a fathom deep. 



In a brief interval of gentleness, however, I found 

 an animal which had long been an object of desire to 

 me, a normal form of the genus Lucernaria. The 

 small, aberrant, vase-like species, L. cyatJiiformis, I had 

 taken already ; but I wished to see the more elegant 

 sorts, which resemble in figure the trumpet-shaped 

 flower of a Convolvulus, representations of which by 



