104 TROPIC DAYS 



seen in shoals skimming the surface of the sea in aban- 

 donment of habitual shyness, and the stomachs of both 

 are found to be full of the greenish-grey slime. With 

 the compliance of the sun the impurity disappears, 

 giving place to the graceful weed of vivid green that 

 attaches itself to dead and whitened shells and fingers 

 of coral covered at low water. Every flood-tide deposits 

 a zone of shells splashed with green, while the shallows 

 glow as a field of rich pasturage. In favourable situa- 

 tions, such as the upper part of a long immersed log, 

 coated to the water-line with goose barnacles, the 

 plant grows long and luxuriantly, falling on each side 

 hke a silken mantle. 



One other season, ephemeral but universal, do the 

 babbling but truth-telling beaches record. No rocky 

 cove, no smooth strand, no rubbis -accumulating creek, 

 no mangrove-fringed islet, no coral esplanade white 

 under the tropic sun, no sand-bank with crest of wind- 

 shaken bush, is free. It is Christmas. Christian and 

 pagan ahke tell it to the sea, and the sea tells it to the 

 beaches in — corks. 



Though there are grounds for the belief that some 

 molluscs are seasonal in their appearances and disappear- 

 ances, the majority are always with us, though subject 

 to many casualties. A few months since an epidemic 

 broke out among a certain species of sea urchins 

 (Echinus), spherical animals with shells thickly set with 

 spines, keen and exceedingly brittle. The beaches were 

 strewn with thousands of the dead, no apparent exterior 

 injury having been suffered. The particular species 

 afflicted gathers to itself, seemingly as a disguise, but 

 perhaps as ballast, the dead shells of cockles, which are 

 retained by the spines. It was noticed that the dead 

 were not encumbered. 



A curious and bne of the rarest^of local shells is that 



