38 FEBRUARY. 



neath the stone to lift, terribly cuts the fingers. On 

 some stones we find hundreds of these treacherous 

 shells, set as thickly as they can stand/ and covering 

 large patches ; on others they are scattered, and some 

 are quite free from them. In an aquarium the little 

 worms protrude their breathing fans very constantly, 

 and are pretty, though not conspicuous objects, being 

 varied with bright blue, grey, and white. Pretty as 

 they are, however, the collector wishes them further a 

 hundred times during his collecting, for, in such an ex- 

 pedition as this, he is fortunate indeed if he come home 

 without half of his fingers gashed with deep incisions, 

 smarting from the sea-water, and all the slower to heal 

 from the skin of the finger-tips being worn to thinness 

 in handling the stones. 



But these are trifles ; the fortune of war ; amply 

 compensated by the joy of victory, when we succeed 

 in capturing some rare or lovely creature, to be dis- 

 played in triumph within the glass walls of a prison. 

 Such an one is this beauty, which is lurking in an 

 angle of the block we have just overturned. It needs 

 a sharp eye to detect it ; for we see no beauty yet, 

 nothing but a little lump of whitish jelly, dappled with 

 orange-yellow, not bigger than the half of a split pea, 

 clinging close to the stone. It requires some care to 

 get it up without crushing ; the end of a toothpick, or 



