A Thousand-Mile Walk 
interesting to learn the richly varied songs, 
or what we mortals call the roar, of expiring 
breakers. I compared their variation with the 
different 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- 
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