A Window of the Sea 3 2 3 



its mouth it would display menacing fanglike 

 teeth. 



The glass window is now poised over a group of 

 forms which must be the flowers of this marine forest. 

 They are gigantic sea-anemones, four or five inches 

 across and several tall, while radiating from the circum- 

 ference are innumerable mauve and purple petals which 

 give the lowly animal, a cousin of the corals, a startling 

 resemblance to a Burbank daisy, or some large flower 

 of that class. Some are fully expanded, standing firm 

 and erect ; others are closed, the petals drawn in so that 

 they appear to be mere mounds of mauve on the rocks. 

 Near them are true corals, which appear to be anem- 

 ones, the delicate pellucid tentacles rising above the 

 limy tube. Moving offshore, huge comet-like jellies may 

 be seen, twenty to thirty feet in length, with dark 

 lavender markings, or more delicate and fairy-like liv- 

 ing traceries drifting in the current, standing out against 

 the deep blue of the sea. Large fishes poise in the 

 lower depths, the large sea-bass mimicking the folds of 

 the great kelpian forest that rolls and sways above them 

 in the current. 



Nature is a very clever masquerader, and has ap- 

 parently so bedecked several large fishes that they find 

 abundant protection in the resemblance to the crimpled 

 leaves of the kelp. None of the lookers-on can see the 

 kelp-fish which the skipper assures them is directly be- 

 fore their eyes. But suddenly the leaf, or what they 

 thought was a leaf, stirs, unbends, and resolves itself 



