Rustic Adornments. 
glimpse of water is always refreshing to the eye ; its clear, cool aspect, the 
mingling of many colours and forms; the peculiar growth of aquatic plants, 
and the still more curious forms and movements of aquatic animals, 
combine to form an assemblage of delightful and ever-changing pictures. 
The Naiads need no longer dwell in forest lone, dipping their white feet 
in streams haunted only by the robin and the humble bee, but may sport in 
gay drawing-rooms, in homely parlours, in the study of the recluse, or the 
chamber of the valetudinarian. No longer need they fear winter storms 
and March hurricanes, but shall henceforth have homes within sheltered 
walls, impervious to frost, and shadowed by curtains, where love whispers, and 
young children play. 
To the naturalist the aquarium opens up new studies of the choicest 
wonders of the deep sea. Those departments of zoology which have for 
their regard the creatures of mid-ocean, or even of the pebble shore, have 
hitherto made the slowest and least satisfactory progress of any; now they 
are to experience a “sea-change,” for the dredge brings up the 
“ Pale glistening pearls, and rainbow-coloured shells ; ” 
and by the preservation of the creatures in their own element, and under 
circumstances approximating in character to those in which they were 
produced, we may study their habits and economy even to the minutest 
particulars. 
It is mostly in the season when the deep green of summer begins to 
wane, and the first tinge of autumnal orange appears like a blotch of lost 
sunshine on the landscape, that our thoughts revert to the vast, and un¬ 
changeable, and mysterious sea— 
' ‘ The glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form 
Glasses itself in tempests.” 
Unchangeable it is, though relatively ever changing • unchanging in its 
character, its office, and its plenitude of life, yet changing to us in its many 
moods of storm and calm, the glittering of its white foam in the sunshine, 
and the roar of its stormy waters in the awful darkness. We have never 
seen enough of the sea, for it never tires, though we visit the same bay, or 
the same creek, or the same breadth of snow-white beach, day after day; for 
the water has a life of its own, and its successive phases of playfulness, 
