274 SUMMER 



one of the few animal perils of our temperate shores. More 

 dangerous, though even rarer, is a cut from the black dorsal 

 iin of the little brown weaver-fish, which lurks near enough 

 to the surface of wet sand to be occasionally trodden upon 

 by bathers. Now and then the spiny back of a sea-urchin 

 protrudes from the sand, as a testimony to the antiquity 

 of so much of this ocean life. Ages before man was yet 

 framed these urchins were laid bare on the sands by the 

 morning's tide. On the chalk downs above the Kentish shore 



THE RISING TIDE 



we can find half a dozen fossil sea-urchins in flint on the same 

 morning as their living descendant. 



The purity of the sea is partly ensured by its brine, which 

 reduces the offensiveness of all the offscourings of the beach 

 and of dead fish and fowl cast ashore. But there is an 

 enormous army of scavengers perpetually at work, turning 

 dead matter into wholesome living flesh again by consuming 

 it as fast as it perishes. The activity of gulls above water is 

 paralleled by that of crabs beneath it. Crabs are perpetually 

 on the watch for food of almost any kind, and will strip a 

 fisherman's hook of bait time after time with almost comical 

 rapidity. They sidle about the shore in all sizes, from the 

 little creatures like tarnished sixpences which rest in the 

 cracks of the shallowest rock-pools to the densely mailed 

 warriors caught in deeper water in the crab-pots. All the 



