A "Thousand-Mile TValk 



interesting to learn the richly varied songs, 

 or what we mortals call the roar, of expiring 

 breakers. I compared their variation with the 

 diflferent distances to which the broken wave- 

 water reached landward in its farthest-flung 

 foam-wreaths, and endeavored to form some 

 idea of the one great song sounding forever all 

 around the white-blooming shores of the world. 

 Rising from my shell seat, I watched a wave 

 leaping from the deep and coming far up the 

 beveled strand to bloom and die in a mass of 

 white. Then I followed the spent waters in 

 their return to the blue deep, wading in their 

 spangled, decaying fragments until chased back 

 up the bank by the coming of another wave. 

 While thus playing half studiously, I discovered 

 in the rough, beaten deathbed of the wave a 

 little plant with closed flowers. It was crouch- 

 ing in a hollow of the brown wave-washed rock, 

 and one by one the chanting, dying waves 

 rolled over it. The tips of its delicate pink 

 petals peered above the clasping green calyx. 

 *' Surely," said I, as I stooped over it for a mo- 

 [ 162] 



