210 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
profound that the minds of the wisest men reel, totter and 
give way when they attempt to grasp and follow it, the little, 
tireless, plodding, stone-secreting corals of our own times have 
descended. The monuments of their Past are the islands and 
continents, whose foundations they laid, that have arisen out of 
the sea—while the Future patiently, in solemn majesty, awaits 
- the completion, in tropical and semi-tropical latitudes, of those 
new foundations, now being so quietly and noiselessly laid by 
these diligent builders, upon which the ‘new earth” of prophecy 
is to rest. 
Looking at them in the perfectly clear waters of the Bahamas, 
how insignificant they appear! Studying them more carefully 
in the light of the vast results which they have already accom- 
plished, they seem foremost among the great builders, made and 
set apart by God for the erection of homes, in a vast and wild 
- waste of waters, for all the varied forms of vegetable and animal 
life. Individually they are seemingly as insignificant as the motes 
in a sun-beam. Oollectively, as seen through the dim mists 
which shroud in gloom the vast unknown periods lying back of 
the small cycles of recorded time, they glow and are hallowed 
with a radiance reflected from a divinity whose decrees they ex- 
ecute. ‘‘ The mill of the gods grinds slow;” to Him who had no 
beginning and is ever existing, ‘“‘a thousand years are as one 
day,”—and as we, from time to time, gazed at and.-reflected upon 
these little but most important creatures in their ocean homes, 
they revealed to us more of the divine than did ever the lofty 
cloud-capped mountain in its sublimity, or the vast ocean when 
vexed and tossed by the wildest and most angry storms. Upon 
our arrival in Nassau they were the first to attract our attention, 
and, before leaving, they were among the last to engage our 
thoughts and employ our pen. When we would propose the task 
of attempting some description of them, we felt an indescribable 
