Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/40

Rh would be able to give you satisfaction about them, unless you happen to meet with a practical working naturalist who has searched up the neighbourhood. You must use your own eyes.

I accordingly took a walk around the shore, from the Lookout southward; making my way down the sloping cliff, which successive landslips have crumbled down and rent into chasms in the grassy turf, threatening at no very distant period the fall of the pretty cottages above, that already stand in perilous proximity to the falling edge. The beach below, sweeping round to Belmont Bay, is loose shingle, most unpleasant and fatiguing to walk over, and one of the most unproductive to the naturalist. Between tide-marks the pebbles are washed clean by the surf, but along the line of high-water, there is here a broad bank of black sea-grass (Zostera), the accumulation of years, perhaps ages, rotting into mould, and forming an admirable manure. It is indeed used for this purpose, being carted away by the farmers when it is sufficiently abundant and sufficiently accessible. In the vicinity of Torquay, and of Ilfracombe, I had not met with this substance in any appreciable quantity; but in Poole Harbour, the scene of my early life, I had been familiar enough with it, as its dirty, littering banks, like a continuous dunghill, fringe the shores; the refuse of hundreds of acres of the grass, that grows on the muddy flats of that land-locked harbour.

Nor was this the only thing that reminded me of early days. As I sauntered with down-cast eyes over the shingle, my eye caught a perforated pebble, and in an instant the rude distich of boyish