THE BEACH AGAIN. 
109 
sends some important message to the owners, and then 
bids farewell to these shores for good and all; or, per¬ 
chance a propeller passed and made fast to some disabled 
craft, or one that had been becalmed, whose cargo of 
fruit might spoil. Though silently, and for the most part 
incommunicatively, going about their business, they were, 
no doubt, a source of cheerfulness and a kind of society 
to one another. 
To-day it was the Purple Sea, an epithet which I 
should not before have accepted. There were distinct 
patches of the color of a purple grape with the bloom 
rubbed off. But first and last the sea is of all colors. 
Well writes Gilpin concerning “ the brilliant hues which 
are continually playing on the surface of a quiet ocean,’’ 
and this was not too turbulent at a distance from the 
shore. Beautiful,” says he, “no doubt in a high degree 
are those glimmering tints which often invest the tops of 
mountains; but they are mere coruscations compared 
with these marine colors, which are continually varying 
and shifting into each other in all the vivid splendor of 
the rainbow, through the space often of several leagues.” 
Commonly, in calm weather, for half a mile from the 
shore, where the bottom tinges it, the sea is green, or 
greenish, as are some ponds; then blue for many miles, 
often with purple tinges, bounded in the distance by a 
light almost silvery stripe; beyond which there is gener¬ 
ally a dark-blue rim, like a mountain ridge in the hori¬ 
zon, as if, like that, it owed its color to the intervening 
atmosphere. On another day it will be marked with 
long streaks, alternately smooth and rippled, light-colored 
and dark, even like our inland meadows in a freshet, 
and showing which way the wind sets. 
Thus we sat on the foaming shore, looking on the 
wine-colored ocean, — 
