Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/140

 coasts where the weed-grown skeletons of wrecks lie buried in the ribbed sand.

And I thought,—Perhaps this was a sailor and perhaps the loving ones who come at intervals to visit his place of rest waited and watched and wept for a ship that never came back.

But when the sea gave up its dead, they bore him to his native city, and laid him in this humble grave, and brought hither the sand that the waves had kissed, and the pink-eared shells within whose secret spirals the moan of ocean lingers forever.

And from time to time his child comes to plant a frail blossom, and smooth the sand with her tiny fingers, talking softly the while, —perhaps only to herself,—perhaps to that dead father who comes to her in dreams.