CHAPTER II. 

 LOW LIFE. 



SOME persons go to the seaside every year for several weeks, 

 and yet know little of its treasures. Take away the bands, 

 the bathing machines, the itinerant entertainers of various 

 kinds, the bustling crowds that pass and repass on the grand 

 parade, and they are lonely, miserable, with nothing to occupy 

 their minds. Of the illimitable sea, the cliffs, the sands, the 

 passing sails they soon tire. For a very small sum, as money 

 is considered to-day, such a person could acquire a tolerable 

 microscope, and a very little application to books would put 

 him in the way of getting an absolutely endless fund of 

 interest, knowledge, even amusement from it. Through the 

 magic glasses he enters another world ; or, rather they enable 

 him to see that other half of Creation with which he has been 

 rubbing shoulders all his life, yet without seeing the creatures. 

 With such an instrument and the knowledge how to use it, a 

 man may defy the demon ennui wherever he may be. With 

 such an instrument at home a person who is not a naturalist 

 may be induced to look into a rock-pool, to take samples of its 

 fauna and flora, and by and by to become a naturalist without 

 intending or knowing it. 



Behold how easy a thing it is ! He has but to take away a 

 phial full of the water, a tiny bunch of coralline, the finer 

 green weed, or a snippet of sponge from the walls of the pool, 

 and he has abundance of material whose marvellous beauties 

 of form and colour will delight and astonish him when he has 

 had time to examine it under the microscope. For the coral- 

 line tuft and the lowly weed, when washed out in the sea- 



