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62 that the cows ate it. It cut like cheese; for I took the earliest opportunity to sit down and deliberately whittle up a fathom or two of it, that I might become more intimately acquainted with it, see how it cut, and if it were hollow all the way through. The blade looked like a broad belt, whose edges had been quilled, or as if stretched by hammering, and it was also twisted spirally. The extremity was generally worn and ragged from the lashing of the waves. A piece of the stem which I carried home shrunk to one quarter of its size a week afterward, and was completely covered with crystals of salt like frost. The reader will excuse my greenness,—though it is not sea-greenness, like his, perchance,—for I live by a river shore, where this weed does not wash up. When we consider in what meadows it grew, and how it was raked, and in what kind of hay weather got in or out, we may well be curious about it. One who is weather-wise has given the following account of the matter.

When descends on the Atlantic

The gigantic

Storm-wind of the equinox,

Landward in his wrath he scourges

The toiling surges,

Laden with sea-weed from the rocks.

From Bermuda's reefs, from edges

Of sunken ledges,

On some far-off bright Azore;

From Bahama and the dashing,

Silver-flashing

Surges of San Salvador;

From the trembling surf that buries

The Orkneyan Skerries,

Answering the hoarse Hebrides;

And from wrecks and ships and drifting

Spars, uplifting

On the desolate rainy seas;