Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/532

524 one. Never mind, you shall tell me what you think by-and-by, when you have had more time to form an opinion. You think the young man handsome, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes! very handsome.”

“But you are not the girl to be fascinated by a handsome face. I can see that you mean that by the contemptuous curl of your lip. Quite true, no doubt, Miss Vincent; but there are some young ladies less strong-minded than yourself, who may be easily bewitched by the delicate outline of a classical profile, or the light of a pair of handsome dark eyes. Eleanor Vincent, do you remember what I said to you when I brought you down to Hazlewood?”

Mr. Monckton was in the habit of addressing both the girls by their Christian names when he spoke seriously.

“Yes, I remember perfectly.”

“What I said to you then implied an amount of trust which I don’t often put in an acquaintance of a couple of hours. That little girl yonder,” added the lawyer, glancing towards the pathway in which Laura Mason flitted about, alternately coaxing and remonstrating with her dogs, “is tender-hearted and weak-headed. I think you would willingly do anything to serve her, and me. You can do her no better service than by shielding her from the influence of Launcelot Darrell. Don’t let my ward fall in love with the young man’s handsome face, Miss Vincent!”

Eleanor was silent, scarcely knowing how to reply to this strange appeal.

“You think I am taking alarm too soon, I daresay,” the lawyer said, “but in our profession we learn to look a long way ahead. I don’t like the young man, Miss Vincent. He is selfish, and shallow, and frivolous,—false, I think, as well. And, more than this, there is a secret in his life.”

“A secret?”

“Yes; and that secret is connected with his Indian experiences.”

of my readers may perhaps remember to have been amused, as children, by an ingenious toy contrived for the exhibition of the curious changes of form, termed Anamorphoses. It consisted of a small cylindrical mirror, and a flat disc of cardboard, the surface of which presented to the eye a patch-work of divers colours, so disposed that the closest observation could detect in their arrangement neither regularity nor design. Here was a patch of brown, there a streak of red, there again a shapeless blotch of green, and in the centre of the disc a small circle left uncoloured. But on placing the polished metal cylinder upon this bare central space and looking, not at the pasteboard disc, but at its reflection in the mirror, a marvellous change was apparent. The patches of brown became transformed into horses, the pink dots into red-coated huntsmen, the green blotches into trees and fields; instead of a confused mass of colour, we had an orderly picture—a hunting field, a landscape, a Dutch interior, or some other scene more or less comic according to the taste or skill of the designer.

Just such a change as this is produced by a few pints of salt water, on the dirty brown masses of seaweed which are thrown by the waves upon our shores, or which cling to and disfigure the rocks. Just so strange is it to mark how quickly and suddenly, twisted and knotted fibres start apart as the water touches them, each assuming its own proper place and falling into lines and curves which no artist save Nature herself can hope successfully to imitate. Difficult indeed it is to believe that the lovely little tree-like structure waving its branches so gracefully in the rock-pool just filled by the advancing tide, is the same with the mass of inextricable confusion making the rocks hideous, from which a moment ago we turned our eyes with a feeling near akin to disgust.

And not over form only does water exercise an influence so powerful, calling order out of chaos, symmetry out of deformity. Over colour, too, its spell is equally potent, giving to the forms which it has created a new and brilliant lustre and collours not their own.

And in no case is the change thus produced more striking than in that of the plants belonging to the order of the Melanospores or Olive-spored seaweeds. For these, unlike most other seaweeds, have when left dry by the receding tide, no bright colours to attract the eyes; they have lost, not a part only, but the whole of their beauty, and have become for the most part utterly hideous and repulsive, and few people therefore know how lovely they really are. For indeed the sea, which has so many beautiful sights to offer us, can show us few more beautiful than a bed of the large brown seaweeds seen on a bright summer day a few feet below the surface of clear water. Looking down through the shadow of our boat we see huge fronds of Oarweed waving majestic in the gentle current, while here and there attached to the broad brown leaves shines a glorious living flower—the lovely green Anthea—one of our commonest English anemones. Long strings of chorda filum (Dead Men’s Ropes), clothed with delicate glistening fibres as of spun glass, shoot straight up to the surface ten, twenty, or even forty feet. Fuci, brown, yellow, and orange, nod and bow to one another in so grotesque a fashion, that we could fancy that like the knight in Fouque’s tale, we were looking down at the goblins in the centre of the earth rolling and tumbling over one another in their sport.

And not the most brilliant of the red seaweeds can show a more beautiful colour than the rich brown of the Oarweed or the lovely phosphorescent green which plays about the fronds of the heath-like Cystoseira, like the lambent light which flickers on a summer night along the edge of each retiring wave. Beautiful indeed is the colour of this last plant, and as evanescent as beautiful, vanishing at once when it is removed from the water, and reappearing as soon as it is replaced.

The head-quarters of the Olive seaweeds are the Equatorial seas. There they flourish with a luxuriance unknown in colder climes, and attain a size which dwarfs by comparison our largest