BATTLEFIELD OF THE SHORE 



for goatfish. Strange crabs and crayfish creep be- 

 hind the incoming surges — camp followers pick- 

 ing here and there at stray corpses of things. 



Six hom^s later everything is changed. The wind 

 has gone down and the water — far out at lowest 

 tide mark — laps against the rocks and slithers 

 gently over a few inches of sand. Recalling condi- 

 tions a quarter of a day before, there comes to mind 

 the tricky arrangement I have seen in the store win- 

 dows of a circular aquarium filled with swinging 

 goldfish surrounding a space in which canaries fly 

 about, so that to the eye of the onlooker fish and 

 birds seem inextricably mingled in the same me- 

 dium. Where sergeant-majors and parrotfish and 

 wrasse wandered and browsed, turnstones, sand- 

 pipers, catbirds and sparrows now hop and fly and 

 chase beach-fleas, a pair of silver-spotted butterflies 

 flutter low over the sand, flies hover about the dead 

 seaweed, a skink darts among the crevices and I my- 

 self creep down to the water's very edge. The fish 

 have been forced back by the pull of the moon and 

 in their place are representatives of the four great 

 groups of land animals — insects, reptiles, birds 

 and mammals. 



I can find no words adequately to tell what this 

 shift of creatures means to me but it has something 

 in it of the deep significance of evolution, of the 

 impersonal, inevitable rhythm of the inorganic, com- 

 pared with the malleable adaptiveness of organic 

 life. The point is wholly lost unless the entire 

 phenomenon is considered simultaneously, — fish- 



87 



