WONDERS OF THE SHORE 1357 



WONDERS OF THE SHORE 



CHARLES KINGSLEY 



SEE, on the shore, a shell bed, quite large, 

 but comely enough to please any eye. What 

 a variety of colors and forms are there, amid the 

 purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder- 

 weed, and tangle (ore-weed they call it in the south), 

 and the delicate green ribbons of the Zostera (the 

 only English flowering plant which grows beneath 

 the sea). What are they all? What are the long, 

 white razors? What are the delicate green-gray 

 cimeters? What are the tapering brown spires? 

 What the tufts of delicate yellow plants like squir- 

 rels' tails and lobsters' horns, and tamarisks, and fir- 

 trees, and all other finely cut animal and vegetable 

 forms? What are the groups of gray bladders, with 

 something like a little bud at the tip? What are the 

 hundreds of little pink-striped pears? What those 

 tiny babies' heads covered with gray prickles in- 

 stead of hair? The great red starfish, which the 

 Ulster children call "the bad man's hands"; and 

 the great whelks, which the youth of Musselburgh 

 know as roaring buckies, these we have seen before; 

 but what, oh what, are the red capsicums? 



Yes, what are the red capsicums? and why are 

 they poking, snapping, starting, crawling, tumbling 

 wildly over each other, rattling about the huge ma- 

 hogany cockles, as big as a child's two fists, out of 

 which they are protruded? Mark them well, for 

 you will perhaps never see them again. 



