THE BEACH AGAIN. 
107 
From time to time we saved a wreck ourselves, a box 
or barrel, and set it on its end, and appropriated it with 
crossed sticks; and it will lie there perhaps, respected 
by brother wreckers, until some more violent storm shall 
take it, really lost to man until wrecked again. We also 
saved, at the cost of wet feet only, a valuable cord and 
buoy, part of a seine, with which the sea was playing, 
for it seemed ungracious to refuse the least gift which so 
great a personage offered you. We brought this home 
and still use it for a garden line. I picked up a bottle 
half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but 
stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which still smacked 
of juniper, — all that remained I fancied from the wreck 
of a rowdy world, — that great salt sea on the one hand, 
and this little sea of ale on the other, preserving their 
separate characters. What if it could tell us its adven¬ 
tures over countless ocean waves ! Man would not be 
man through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I 
poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that 
man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, 
which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a 
while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances ; 
but destined erelong to mingle with the surrounding 
waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore. 
In the summer I saw two men fishing for Bass here¬ 
abouts. Their bait was a bullfrog, or several small 
frogs in a bunch, for want of squid. They followed a 
retiring wave and whirling their lines round aild round 
their heads with increasing rapidity, threw them as far 
as they could into the sea; then retreating, sat down, flat 
on the sand, and waited for a bite. It was literally (or 
littorally) walking down to the shore, and throwing your 
line into the Atlantic. I should not have kno\\’n what 
