THE TROPICAL SEAS. 133 



peacefully browse and nibble the young tips of the 

 growing coral. Fantastically-formed little shrimp- 

 like beings, almost as transparent as the water itself, 

 and invisible but for the crimson and violet marks 

 that bedeck their bodies, are sailing or shooting 

 through the weedy groves; and tiny squadrons of 

 pellucid jelly-fishes, and innumerable other strange 

 creatures, now reflect the beam of the vertical sun, 

 and flash into radiance, then relapse into invisibility 

 and secrecy again. Then, like the demon of the para- 

 dise, comes stealing along the grim and hateful shark, 

 turning up his little green eye of concentrated malig- 

 nity, as he passes under your boat, and making your 

 very soul shudder at that gaze. 



So again, in the Caribbean Sea, whose crystalline 

 clearness attracted the admiring notice of Columbus, 

 I have stood with delight on the bowsprit of a ship, 

 as she thridded her perilous way through a channel 

 of the coral reef, so narrow as scarcely to allow her 

 sides to pass without rubbing, and marked the sea-life 

 that studded those stony walls. Then, emerging upon 

 a deep bay, where the distant bottom of yellow sand 

 seemed only a few yards beneath the eye, I saw 

 the dark-purple, long-spined Ecliini, and vast, slug- 

 glish, red Urasters, and huge Strombi and Cassides, 

 go straggling along ; while here and there some enor- 

 mous tree of coral, or shapeless mass of brown sponge, 

 rose from the sandy waste, like solitary bushes in the 

 desert, and flexible corallines waved their long arms 

 to and fro, in the gentle swell of the ocean. 



