NONSUCH 



there are Cliff Dwellers, Sand Livers, Nomad Hill- 

 men, and Homesteaders. 



I once saw men in shell-holes menaced by a flock 

 of swooping, peering planes, by a deadly horizontal 

 stratum of machine-gun bullets a yard above the 

 ground, and worst of all, as dusk closed down, by 

 the ghastly Very lights which seem to pierce to one's 

 soul. Their only hope of life was to look more like 

 bits of the shell-hole than the shell-hole itself. I re- 

 called this in the middle of the Sargassum Sea, over 

 a thousand miles from any dry land, when I used 

 to scoop up on deck netfuls of the golden weed, ap- 

 parently a pure culture of algse, to see it produce, 

 like a conjurer's rabbits from a hat, a score of little 

 animals of a half-dozen wholly unrelated groups 

 who had made this weed their permanent shell-hole 

 of life. In form, color, pattern, and even in motion 

 they were botanized ; algee — bits of the sargassum 

 — angular, golden, mottled, and with a weaving, 

 bending movement as of seaweed rocked by the 

 waves. 



Most abundant was a small crab, a chunky, four- 

 square chap, hardly a half -inch across, who but for 

 the grace of eyes, mouth, muscles, and ganglia 

 might have been a stray torn shred of gulfweed. 

 This was my first introduction to the well-named 

 Little Wanderer of the Sargassum — Planes mi- 

 nutus. 



Planes has played a part in history — all un- 

 knowingly. Christopher Columbus was a great man 

 but no carcinologist, and in the dark, discouraged 



188 



