Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/158

150 of brain he wrote the rousing novel over which that lady bends and weeps. He has come for a holiday; and falls into the telescopic pebble-gathering world with grateful acquiescence. Does he trouble himself with the wonders of the sea shore? Does he kneel down and grope among the rocks, at low tide, struggling with wretched sea anemones, who hold on for the dear life till some lover of nature uproots them? How they must hate the season and Mr. Gosse! Poor things! I remember being shown a number of them by a scientific friend, who took them out every morning with a long spoon, and laid them, gasping and limp, on a bench, while he changed the water in their cage. Some were dark and tough, showing that they were used to plenty of daylight or low tides; others were quite fair and blanched from living in the dark depths of the sea. But they were nevertheless herded with their swarthy brethren, and blinked at the sun miserably. I can’t help thinking that pseudo-science, however attractive, is often very cruel. The boiling of lobsters is a process which, however speedy, one does not much like to associate with salad, or supper. The first thrill in the pot must be horrible, but it is soon over. Whereas a slow death in an aquarium, with great eyes looking at you and offering quantities of unsuitable food, together with the puzzling resistance of the glass, like the mysterious detention of a dream, must altogether make the last hours of a “specimen” hideous. It must be as bad as dying of nightmare. “Oh! my lovely star-fish are all dead!” says charming Angelina, as she joins the breakfast table, after nine hours of the soundest rosiest sleep. “They are only just dead, I think,” says she, with her mouth full of toast and butter. “I saw one of them move a little”—very likely. But what a night for the star-fish!

Now your busy man, or rather your man who really works hard in his profession, will, if he be wise and brave, leave the wonders of the seashore alone when he comes to rest. Lying on the rounded shingle, he lets his mind uncoil and gather unconsciously suppleness and strength; he lets it stretch and sun itself without interruption. And he is no loser, for so surely as he is content and not ashamed to sit maybe for a whole bright forenoon, doing nothing, thinking of nothing, the unfolded mind will have filled itself like a sleeping net; and when afterwards he gropes within for thought and illustration he will find good store. The dusty, faded chambers of his brain will have become wholesome and fresh. He will return to the operating-room, the law court, the editor’s den, with an atmosphere of salt and sunshine about him. Of course, some active mind’s must grub about the rocks and fish in the clear pools of brine left by the tide, but I beg once for all to protest against the sweeping condemnation uttered by some people, who would employ every idle saunterer on a fruitful beach.

Let them whip the bonâ fide lounger, the man who never works. Ay! there is something in that; or better still, let them try to save him. Seize the moment when the dull mind is touched with fresh thought, when the sleepiness of the daily inland routine is somewhat rubbed off, and arouse a new interest in a crab if you can. There are people who have been plucked from a life of blindness by the wonders of the shore. The only danger is of a relapse, as if the “littoral zone” were really more wonderful than the brook round the meadow, or the glade in the wood.

Therefore do I like to see—though they be only faint flashes of thought (like summer lightning), quickened in the drowsy mind by some popular revelation of the beach; nay, I like to see even a persevering reliance on the brightness of wet pebble. True, the gems are opaque in the morning—not to say gritty—and will probably be found by the next comer to the lodgings in the drawer of the dressing-table; but they have rubbed a human mind as well as one another. They have perhaps made some crafty soul childlike for a day. Childlike! Give me either science or simplicity. Either a seeing eye, which, however ignorant of geological details, recognises the progress of the world as it rests on a cliff; or the eye which loves the cliff, without a reason indeed, though none the less for that—perhaps the more. Preserve me from the distilled prattle of the conscientious quack who grinds up facts out of a printed book, and then repeats them at hap-hazard, because he thinks educated society expects some acquaintance with the phraseology of science. Protect me from him, I should only put him out; let him enjoy himself in his own way, I in mine, out of shot. Perhaps, while I am peopling a flat valley with ancient monsters, smacking the slime with their great tails, gobbling, sleeping, snorting, fighting—while I hear the shriek and the rustle of strange birds in the air, but see the same blessed sun above our heads, the same harvest moon, though rising on the unreaped earth—while I am thus out of date, or may be picturing to myself the naked battle around the barrows on the windy downs, my friend with the book shouts to me that he thinks he has found a Coleopterum ridiculosum in the shingle. Will I come and see? And the inspected beast bounds off his open palm with an elastic “spang,”—very like a shrimp, as I tell him,—and is gone past verification; is probably at the moment hastily shoving himself, at great risk of bruises, deep down among his native stones. But my friend says, contemptuously, that it cannot be a shrimp—because shrimps are red.

There is one subject in which all seaside visitors are expected to take an interest, and that is the annual regatta. Nine-tenths of them don’t know a brig from a schooner, but they talk as if they had built the winning boat, screwing away at everything with their telescopes throughout the day. There are, however, moments in a regatta which the uninitiated may enjoy, as when a number of white-sailed yachts open their wings together like rising gulls; but, to most, the duck-hunt at the end affords a sensible relief. They have been bewildered with the banging of signal guns and sudden jaunty appearance of all the craft in the harbour, which string up every scrap of bunting they have on board for the occasion. The “million” have never any clear idea of the merits of the boats, get sorely deceived about time races, and, as I said, gladly welcome the “duck-hunt” and “greased bowsprit.” Paterfamilias—