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One of the reasons for the existence of such things as railway lines, steam engines, express trains, guards, porters, and newsboys is the very simple but important fact that children who live in cities <em>mustem> be carried, with their buckets and spades, at least once a year to dig castles in the sands of the seashore. Thousands and thousands of dollars are spent in this manner. And if there were no buckets and spades, and no sand at the seaside, hundreds of guards and porters would be thrown out of work, and far fewer trains would go screeching and thundering across the green fields. So, you see, children are good for trade as well as good for nothing, as your nurse sometimes tells you.

But then there are other things to do at the seaside in addition to castle digging. Castle digging is, of course, the chief reason for the existence of the sand, and it is splendid particularly when half a dozen diggers are at work, and the castle has terraces and turrets, with a deep moat running all around it and a bridge across it, and no end of sea-grass and tangled seaweed hanging over the parapets, like moss and lichen. But there are other things as well. There is paddling, for instance, a daring sport, something like fox-hunting, but one which the dear doctors say gives children so many illnesses.

And there is also the joy of listening to organs, and going for rides on shaggy donkeys, whose saddles are worn into holes, showing the padding, and who smell like hot blankets and a bootmaker’s apron. And there are cocoanut shies, and conjuring, and throwing stones at a tin bucket on papa’s walking-stick, and tennis; and there is even kicking off our sand shoes and running barefoot races on the smooth-ribbed sand.

And there is <em>going for a walk with our eyes openem>.

Suppose you were taken one year not to Long Branch, or Portsmouth, or Nantucket, or Narragansett, or Coronada, or Norfolk, but to a little old rickety fishing village, with no esplanade, no pier, no band, no monkeys, no donkeys, <em>no nothingem> would it be very dull? Suppose, too, that instead of broad, smooth, yellow sands, the waves came breaking with a rattle and a roar on miles of shingle miles and miles of stones! would it be very dull? Well, it all depends on whether you keep your eyes open or shut, and whether you want to cram your brain with observation, or keep it only for the multiplication table and geography.

For a walk along the sands or along the shingle can be full of interest every yard of the way. To begin with, it is by the side of the sea that we can best feel the tremendous wonder of creation. The sea is older than anything else on the earth; it has always been there, and just think of it from the very beginning it has always been moving. Motion is a marvelous miracle. The motion of the sea, which you look at with your eyes, and the noise of it, which fills your ears, existed thousands and thousands of years before there was any animal walking about the earth, and wondering where in the name of fortune it came from. Stop and think about the deep boom of the ocean and the roar of the waves on shore and rock, going on for thousands of years before there was even a mouse or a grasshopper on the green earth. How grand, but how lonely it must have been!

Then think about the sands. Take up a handful near the cliffs, and it runs through your fingers like powder; go near to the waves, where it is wet, and you will see in it tiny grains of various colours. The sands have been smashed and powdered by the sea. Once there were shells and stones; the sea has ground them into dust. Every year the stones on a beach grow smaller and smaller. If you make a hole in the sand, and thrust your arm down as far as it will go, you will sometimes find rough sand.

Then, whether you walk on smooth yellow sand, or trudge heavily over pebbles, you will find no end of things which are most interesting to pick up and examine. There is the starfish, that little five-fingered, red-brown fellow, who lies dead or dying in hundreds all around the coast; turn him over on his back, and if he is alive you will find that he can turn himself over as cleverly as a gymnast, for he has any number of tentacles on his under-side, which he uses when he goes for a walk over the rocks in search of a seaside breakfast. He feeds, let me tell you, on dead fish, and things that no respectable live fish would look at for a moment, so he is useful to keep the sea clean.

Then there is the jellyfish, which floats in the waves and has to go wherever they choose to send him, for he has got no legs, no fins, no tentacles to speak of, and is really hardly a live thing at all. But it is just because he is such a helpless dead-alive old fellow that he is interesting. He reminds us of the very beginning of life. He is life at its lowest. He just goes about like a man in a dream, only bothering to keep all his pores open to drink water; and if you catch him, and lay him on the sands, the sun will soon drink him clean up, and leave nothing to tell he has ever been at all, except a streak of silvery-whitish slime. And yet he is ever so much more alive than the finest pair of patent-leather boots in a Chicago shop-window or the grandest statue in the Metropolitan Museum. He rides out a storm like a man-o’-war. It is only when we compare him with a milkman, or a boy spinning a peg-top and picking it up in his hand, that we see how very, very little alive he really is.

Shells are wonderfully interesting things. Have you noticed that the shell of a whelk has its opening always on the right side? I know a man who is extremely happy because he once dug up in a crag-pit the shell of a whelk, much older than the human race, which has its opening on the left side. How did that happen? Or why should a shell almost always have its opening on the right side? Why is it? Have you ever thought about that? Nature is the most teasing riddle in the world, very hard to solve.

Sometimes you will find one of these whelk-shells inhabited by a funny little crab-like creature, who can be dragged out a great way, but will never leave go without his tail. Hell give you his head cheerfully, but never, never will he give up his tail to you or the Czar of Russia. He’s most particular about his tail, and always leaves it behind him when he is pulled out of doors. This is the hermit crab, and he is the cuckoo of the seashore; for the lazy fellow never thinks of making his own shell; he says: “Why should I, when there are so many far better shells than ever I could make close at hand?” And he just pops into the cast-off shell of some other creature, or even eats that creature out of house and home, and adds insult to injury by occupying the house and home himself after the dinner.

If I were to begin to tell you about crabs there would be no end to it; so I must only say, that if you want to make an alderman jealous, carry home two or three green crabs in a bucket of water, and then show the alderman how these brave fellows fight and tussle over every piece of meat you drop into the water. Crabs have magnificent appetites. Nothing, you see, can ever really be to them “a good blow out.” I believe a crab would knock his own mother over, or dance on his baby sister, to get at a piece of lean beef or a slice of new spring lamb and this, if you please, after he has just had a dinner big enough for a troop of horses. Crabs ought to be called sea-hogs.

The sea anemone is not so fierce-looking as the crab, but she they are beautiful enough to be called shes is hardly as nice in her behaviour as we could wish. Look at them in a rocky pool, lying so gracefully and innocently on the silver sand, with beautiful soft green sea-grass on each side of them. No wonder we call them anemones; they are the flowers of the sea. But look. A poor little baby shrimp who has forgotten what his mother told him about keeping safe at home darts out for a scamper across the pool. If we had very powerful eyes, we should probably see the anemone trembling all over with delight as jelly would on the dining-room table when someone kicks the leg. “Ha, ha!” says the innocent-looking anemone. “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a shrimpyman!” and lo and behold, just as the baby shrimp darts across the top of the anemone, and touches the trembling tentacles, “<em>Snapem>!” cries that deceitful creature, and holds the baby shrimp as tight as a nut in the crackers. It is all over with the shrimp. His mother will never see him again. He will never wag his tail and wink his eye at baby lobsters. He will never grow up to be caught by a respectable fisherman in a kind net, and eaten by a dear little boy with bread and butter and watercress at five o’clock tea. No; he has grown into one body with a beautiful and innocent-looking anemone.

There are hundreds of things to be looked at in pools. If you lie on the rocks, and keep quite still, looking down into the clear water, you will see many little fish, such as the blenny, and the fur-bearded rockling, and bright-coloured wrasses, besides no end of queer crabs, shrimps, and anemones. It is splendid work to observe all this mysterious life going on in one tiny pool, and to dream of what these creatures think, and to wonder what becomes of them for they really are alive when they die.

And it is also most interesting to make a collection of creatures and seaweed, and carry them home in a bucket or satchel, and examine them carefully under a big magnifying glass. You will be amazed to find how much extraordinary thought and power has gone to the creation of the very tiniest thing that you can find on the seashore.