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Updated: June 1, 2025


The boat's sail, spread under the shade of a tree, kept the intense heat a little at bay until after dinner, and this most essential part of the day's programme have been done ample justice to, and the pipes lighted and smoked out, we wandered about the long space left bare by the tide, amusing ourselves by collecting oysters, cowrie shells, and periwinkles.

"Not a bit," it said; "it was nearly all sand where I lived, and coal grew on trees, and the periwinkles were as big as tea-trays you find them now; they're turned into stone. We Sand-fairies used to live on the seashore, and the children used to come with their little flint-spades and flint-pails and make castles for us to live in.

The shells were chiefly periwinkles; there were also mussels, the large claws of crabs, the bones of vertebrate fishes and land animals, as well as some hard slabs of pottery resembling the baking-pans used by the wilder tribes at the present day. Among them, the labourers were startled by coming upon human bones, in irregular positions and at unequal depths, huddled and jumbled together.

The afternoon of our visit it was in the sole charge of a large, gray cat, which, after feasting upon the favorite herb, lay stretched in sleep on a sunny bed of catnip under the walls of a mansion near, at whose windows some young girls looked down in a Sunday listlessness, as we wandered about among the "tall cypresses, myrtles, pines, eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, cactuses, huge bushes of monthly roses, a jungle of periwinkles, sarsaparilla, wild irises, violets, and other loveliest of wild flowers."

Plants grow in the pool and the shores are lined with iris, primroses, periwinkles, pampas grass and, overtopping these, weeping willows mingled with other lovely trees and shrubs. Towards the end of the Avenue is the small but attractive Hawaiian pavilion. The tower of the California building is silhouetted against the background of the Marin hills.

In spite of his jests over the periwinkles, he has a taste for flowers, and had obtained from the gardener the concession of a little plot of ground to cultivate according to his fancy. The Count, it appears, had ratified this favor; but this unheard-of condescension proved to be but a refinement of cruelty.

The nightingales already begin to bubble into song under the Ludovisi ilexes and in the Barberini Gardens. Daisies have snowed all over the Campagna, periwinkles star the grass, crocuses and anemones impurple the spaces between the rows of springing grain along the still brown slopes.

Perhaps it would be a little shore crab that betrayed itself by scuffling down amongst the corallite or sea-weed, perhaps a little fierce-looking bristly fish, which shot under a ledge of the rock all amongst the limpets, acorn barnacles, or the thousands of yellow and brown and striped snaily fellows that crawled about in company with the periwinkles and pelican's feet.

We saw here some cormorants, gulls, crab-catchers, etc., a few small land birds, and a sort of white parrots, which flew a great many together. We found some shell-fish, viz., limpets, periwinkles, and abundance of small oysters growing on the rocks, which were very sweet. In the sea we saw some green turtle, many sharks, and abundance of water-snakes of several sorts and sizes.

I give you all Salmigondinois, and my large shore full of whelks, cockles, and periwinkles, if, by your industry, I ever set foot on firm ground. Alas, alas! I drown. Harkee, my friends, since we cannot get safe into port, let us come to an anchor in some road, no matter whither. Drop all your anchors; let us be out of danger, I beseech you.

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