Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/125

84 half awake, quite unlike the "fast-living" people that one is accustomed to see in these days. Two or three sailors lounging in as many of the little stone-porches, a superannuated fisherman with palsied fingers weaving a mat of spunyarn, a little girl with pitcher on her shoulder going for water to the brook, and a woman or two half up the steep, and almost over the houses, hanging out clothes, made up about the sum total of the moving population.

Indications of the habits and doings of the village, however, there were. At every second door nets were hung out to dry; and pieces of water-logged timber, splintered and torn by tempests, collections of rusty nails and iron-work, crumpled sheets of green copper, old blocks, and fragments of cordage, were heaped up beneath the windows, or lay in the porticoes at every turn. Fishing and wrecking were evidently the characteristic means of living here.

I walked along the margin of the shore, where the transparent wavelets of the wide, horizonless sea were washing the pebbles, and producing a constant succession of whispering cadences, that fell musically, the voices of the many-sounding sea. Medusæ, by Scores, were washed up, the common Aurelia aurita, lying helpless on the shingle like cakes of jelly, each marked with four rings of purple. These were the first Acalephs I had seen this season, and well pleased I was to see them.

Wearisome walking it is over the pebbly beach; the loose stones give away beneath the tread, and at every step the foot sinks in above the shoe-top. How wonderful to reflect that, with such an apparently