THE KINGDOM OF THE HELMET 69 



shots and crossbows and shoot what particular fish you 

 wish with barbed arrows of brass wire. I now use dynamite 

 caps on the end of a weighted fishpole, but sUng-shots and 

 stabbing grains are safer for the beginner. 



If you wish to make a garden, choose some beautiful 

 slope or reef grotto and with a hatchet chop and pry off 

 coral boulders with waving purple sea-plumes and golden 

 sea-fans and great parti-colored anemones. Wedge these 

 into crevices, and in a few days you will have a sunken 

 garden in a new and miraculous sense. As birds collect 

 about the luxuriant growths of a garden in the upper air, 

 so hosts of fish will follow your labors, great crabs and 

 starfish will creep thither, and now and then fairy jelly- 

 fish will throb past, superior in beauty to anything in 

 the upper world, more delicate and graceful than any 

 butterfly. 



Our grandmothers lined their garden paths with conch 

 shells, but under-sea it is more difficult to do this, for the 

 giant snails will insist on walking away as soon as you 

 have planted them. But other exquisite shells can be scat- 

 tered about, and the easiest and quickest way to discover 

 these is to search until you have found the hiding place 

 of an octopus, and here you will be certain to find a col- 

 lection of empty shells of all kinds. The octopus is an 

 adept at searching out toothsome mollusks, and he then 

 carries them to his lair and devours the inmates at his 

 leisure. The shells, quite perfect, are then thrown outside 

 into his kitchen-midden. 



