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Updated: June 17, 2025
But in the midst of all the trouble, May would come tripping over the rocks, a little sunburnt girl now, with tattered clothes and bare feet, and she would bring a pretty pink conch-shell or the lovely rose-colored sea-mosses, and tell her funny little story of where she found them.
The walls were tinted a delicate gray, an excellent background for the pictures that adorned them here and there: most of these were marine views, that over the fireplace, a very large and fine one, of a storm at sea. On the mantel-shelf were heaped sea-mosses, shells, and coral; but the tiles below it represented Scripture scenes.
I only call the icebergs the principal passengers, because they take up so much room; for thousands and millions of other travellers come with them, from the white bears asleep on the bergs, and brought away quite against their will, to the tiniest little creatures rocking in the cradles of the ripples, or clinging to the delicate branches of the sea-mosses.
The portal was a tall arch of Venetian gothic tipped with a carven flame; steps of white Istrian stone descended to the level of the lowest ebb, irregularly embossed with barnacles, and dabbling long fringes of soft green sea-mosses in the rising and falling tide.
"O heavens!" she exclaimed, "I saw an alligator a few days ago." An expression of horror passed over his face. "I've cautioned her not to fish so much for shells and sea-mosses," said he; "but she was always so self-willed." "Don't say anything against the little darling!" implored Rosa. "Perhaps we shall never see her again."
The sea lay like so much glass; every ship and boat was double; every line and rope and spar had its counterpart; and it seemed hard to say which was the more real, the under or the upper world. Madame de Frontignac and Mary had brought a little basket with them, which they were filling with shells and sea-mosses. The former was in high spirits.
As his foot pressed the half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses matting the place, and a chance phantom cats-paw an islet of breeze, unheralded unfollowed as this ghostly cats-paw came fanning his cheek; as his glance fell upon the row of small, round dead-lights all closed like coppered eyes of the coffined and the state-cabin door, once connecting with the gallery, even as the dead-lights had once looked out upon it, but now calked fast like a sarcophagus lid; and to a purple-black tarred-over, panel, threshold, and post; and he bethought him of the time, when that state-cabin and this state-balcony had heard the voices of the Spanish king's officers, and the forms of the Lima viceroy's daughters had perhaps leaned where he stood as these and other images flitted through his mind, as the cats-paw through the calm, gradually he felt rising a dreamy inquietude, like that of one who alone on the prairie feels unrest from the repose of the noon.
Then came a tremendous ringing in her ears and she felt her breath go and she knew nothing more until she found herself standing with the strange little fish man by the side of a splendid carriage made of a scallop shell, burnished until it shone with pearl and silver, and drawn by two beautiful gold-fish and two silver-fish harnessed with the silken threads of the finest sea-mosses, and driven by an old coachman that looked like a mackerel.
Shining scraps of mountain minerals garnets and bright-tinted quartz and beryls, heaped artistically, rather than scientifically, on a base of jasper and malachite and dark basalt and glistening spar and curious fossils; these not gathered by any means in a single summer or in ordinary ramblings, but treasured long, and standing, some of them, for friendly memories balanced on the one side a like grouping of shells and corals and sea-mosses on the other, upon a broad bracket-mantel put up over a little corner fireplace; for Miss Craydocke's room, joining the main house, took the benefit of one of its old chimneys.
The beaming beacon still keeps vigil over Nantucket's peaceful slumberers, while her little ones, in their gladsome dreams of childhood, wander up and down those shores, intent upon their search for the most delicate sea-mosses, exclaiming with each new found treasure, "See! I have found a gem among the sea-weeds."
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