DOWN BY 
THE SEA. 
BY CHARLES HALLOCK. ¥ 
The ebb tides on the Pacific Coast are 
something remarkable. As I stroll 
along the seething shore, with all the 
boulders and crags slippery and rank 
with the pervading odor from the un- 
covered repository of the sea, peering 
into clefts and crannies, opening out 
snarls of seaweed with my crooked 
stick, and lifting pendulous draperies 
of soggy kelp, I discover uncouth 
creatures with horny claws and brist- 
ling spines, which stare at me with 
glassy eyes, clinging defiantly to the 
place ot their exposure. If I poke at 
them they rise up on edge and snap 
and dart and pinch the stick. Some 
pettishly withdraw, spitting spiteful 
jets of arimony, while others attach 
themselves by insidious discs or suckers 
which no small force or shrewd device 
is able to unloose. The spirit of evil 
clings not more tenaciously to human 
fapace:, lf oit had been my hand, 
nothing but shreds of flesh and blood 
would satisfy the grudge. With their pro- 
tecting element—the sea—withdrawn, 
they are practically hors de combat, yet 
repellant. When the tide comes in 
they will be aggressive enough. It is 
not a nice place fora bath. Here are 
giant crabs, five inches wide by actual 
measurement, with .mandibles' two 
inches long armed with two teeth on 
each side, larger than a man’s, and ser- 
rated claw-legs with points one-quarter 
of an inch high. Close by, moving in- 
explicably over the rocks, seems a 
pewter wash-basin, bottom up, dingy 
with use; but turn it over and we find 
it filled with a tangle of legs, sprawl- 
ing and kicking—and it has a handle a 
foot long, three-sided like a bayonet, 
serrated on the edges. It is a horse- 
shoe crab, more horrid than hurtful. 
All over the sodden premises, scattered 
among the parti-colored kelp and sea- 
weeds, areconchs, abelones, periwinkles 
and spirals, with their protruding ten- 
ants gasping for the beneficent moist- 
une not the tardy, tides.. Touch them 
ever so gently, and some will pull in 
their heads, and some thrust them out 
further. They have a bland, innocu- 
ous look; yet if one of them once shuts 
down its valve on a presumptuous 
hand, the creature will hold its grip 
until the tide comes in and drowns the 
man, for some of them are glued fast 
to the rocks so that no ordinary means 
will pry them off. Here also are many 
chances to find a specimen of that 
gigantic race of clams called 77zdacrza 
gigantea, four feet in diameter, with 
involuted edges, such as have been 
sometimes used as church basins for 
holy water. The shores are too bold 
for mud flats, but there are exceptional 
small areas where the gigantic geoduck, 
a soft-shell clam, which sometimes 
weighs eight pounds, vegetates in oozy 
retirement a foot beneath the surface, 
squirting aloft its tremendous jets, four 
feet high, whenever a passing foot 
chances to disturb its shellfish privacy ; 
and there are also flats near the mouths 
of rivers which on gala days, when the 
festive clam luxuriates, seem to be filled 
with miniature fountains, squirting. 
In soft places sand-lances burrow deeply, 
leaving only their tails out; and fiddler 
crabs and crawfish have burrows into 
which they dart when frightened. In 
some pockets of standing water left by 
the ebb we sometimes see a clam or 
