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Johnston is due, as far as is known, the honour of the first accomplishment of this as of a hundred other zoological triumphs. As early as 1842, he proved to himself the vegetable nature of the common pink Coralline, which fringes every rock-pool, by keeping it for eight weeks in unchanged salt-water, without any putrefaction ensuing.
For he takes the same colour as the rocks and sands of his home. Amid the glinting lights and shadows of his rock-pool, with a background of sand, rock, and weed, this little fish is nearly invisible. Of course it is a dodge, and a useful one, to escape the eye of the enemy! Perhaps you will not think the Spotted Goby so clever at nest-building as the Stickleback.
'I see it has, he answered. Then to himself he said: 'She can't translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can't render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock-pool, and to bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will see I was not indispensable.... The lane led up to the eastern down.
You can fancy the marvels of this vast rock-pool, nine miles round and varying from a third to half a mile broad, swarming with tropic life and flights of painted fishes; where the glittering albicore passed beneath the boat like a fire and a shadow; where the boat's reflection lay as clear on the bottom as though the water were air; where the sea, pacified by the reef, told, like a little child, its dreams.
So, from one tide to the next, the rock-pool is like a prison containing prisoners of the strangest sort. How is the sand formed? Give the names of some of the animals to be found in the rock-pools. Where do these animals hide? Prawns and shore-crabs are not easily seen; why is this? On some parts of our coast we find steep cliffs, with the sea beating wildly at their feet.
The west is heavy with ink-clouds and rich colour, but the east, where the moon rises, is clear as a rock-pool. They go across the lawn and through the beech wood and come at last, through a tangle of underwood and bramble, to a little level tableland that rises out of the flat hill-top one tableland out of another.
Often and often the people of Vauroque and Plaisance would see them pass, hand in hand and full of talk, when the Vicar had wished to see with his own eyes one or other of Nance's wonderful discoveries, in the shape of cave or rock-pool, or deposit of sparkling crystal fingers amethyst and topaz or what not. For she was ever lighting on odd and beautiful bits of Nature's craftsmanship.
They had not intended to spend the afternoon, but found themselves too fascinated to turn away from the breakers bursting upon the rocks and from the many kinds of colorful sea life starfish, crabs, mussels, sea anemones, and, once, in a rock-pool, a small devilfish that chilled their blood when it cast the hooded net of its body around the small crabs they tossed to it.
Close by the cave's mouth he crouched for a moment, felt the hammer of his gun, and, uncovering the lantern with a quick turn of the hand, passed it to Dan'l and marched boldly in. The soft sand made a floor for the cave for maybe sixty feet within the entrance. It ended on the edge of a rock-pool a dozen yards across, and deep enough to reach above a man's knees.
He would lie with his face over a rock-pool by the hour, watching the strange forms of life to be seen there, or sit in the woods motionless as a stone, watching the birds and the swift-slipping lizards. The birds came so close that he could easily have knocked them over, but he never hurt one or interfered in any way with the wild life of the woods.
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