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Away she sailed, peering amidst the many objects covering the sea-floor. Do you suppose it is an easy matter to find a fish that has got lost? I caught the flying-fish because he never got far away from me. But here was a young rascal that had gone off roaming, almost before he knew how to feed himself, and search as she might, nowhere could his mother find the rogue of a runaway.
He showed her, for instance, the great Government farms as they passed them, standing white and trim upon the prairie, and bade her think of the busy brains at work there magicians conjuring new wheats that will ripen before the earliest frosts, and so draw onward the warm tide of human life over vast regions now desolate; or trees that will stand firm against the prairie winds, and in the centuries to come turn this bare and boundless earth, this sea-floor of a primeval ocean, which is now Western Canada, into a garden of the Lord.
And once more, why are those strange microscopic atomies, the Diatomaceae and Infusoria, which fill every stagnant pool; which fringe every branch of sea-weed; which form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the strata of whole moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds of the volcanic dust; why are their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Poet?
"Why, sir, he dreamed he saw the women of the islands, sitting by the shores, a-sifting gold-dust and a-weighing of pearls; and then he dreamed that he looked along the sea-floor, leagues and leagues to the south'ard, until he saw the very roots of the mainland, and the great fish swimming in and out.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis. For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns. Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
Her whole figure dilated; she seemed to drink in strength from every object which met her in the great universe around; and slowly, from among the shells and seaweeds, she rose to her full height, the mystic cestus glittering round her waist, in deep festoons of emeralds and pearls, and stepped forward upon the marble sea-floor, wringing the dripping perfume from her locks, as Aphrodite rose of old.
He had been spewed up, mangled and dying, from his rest on the sea-floor, where he might have lived till the Judgment Day, and we saw the tides of his life go from him as an angry tide goes out across rocks in the teeth of a landward gale. His mate lay rocking on the water a little distance off, bellowing continually, and the smell of musk came dawn upon the ship making us cough.
They did not hear the first peal of the midnight clock, until the sudden darkness which that stroke heralded reminded them of the hour. The place which had blazed with light was now as black as some sea-floor cavern, and that should have been the signal for a hundred horns and rattlers and shouts of greeting, and the reaching of hands to meet and grasp other hands across the tables.
Who would suppose that the secret history of this great beast would ever be revealed, as it lay century after century beneath the sea-floor?
The rocks which are composed of their remains show that vast areas of the sea-floor must have been covered with groves of sea-lilies, bending on their long, flexible stalks and waving their great flower-like arms in the water to attract food. With them there is now a new experiment in the stalked Echinoderm, the Blastoid, an armless type; but it seems to have been a failure.
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