Brothers and sisters

by Abbie Farwell Brown

Rose could not answer that question. So they decided to go on. Kenneth helped Rose and Rose helped Kenneth, and they scrambled and climbed and puffed and panted, and bumped their knees on the rock, which was the hardest one that they had ever climbed. But at last they came to the top; and beyond, down below, was a flat rock which the tide had just washed clean as a spandy floor.

“Pooh!” said Kenneth. “I don’t think that is very much to find. I hoped there would be at least a cave.”

“Let’s go down,” said Rose. “I think it looks nice. See, there is a shelf over the edge. Perhaps there is a cave or something under this big rock. I want to go down and see.”

So they began to slide and scramble again; and it is a great deal easier to slide down than up, as every one knows. In a very few moments Kenneth landed on all fours on the flat shelf of rock, and in another minute Rose bumped down beside him. And then Rose said “Oh!”

Now perhaps you think that she said “Oh!” because she had bumped her little nose on the hard rock. But that was not the reason. Rose scarcely ever cried, even when she bumped herself hard, for she was a brave little girl, the nicest kind of a sister for a boy to have.

No; Rose said “Oh!” because she had made a discovery. There was something under the shelf of rock down which they had slid. There was a pool of water; a long, shallow pool of sea-water as cold as ice, into which Rose had plunged her foot. But that was not all. It was a tiny, beautiful sea-garden full of flowers.

Kenneth cried “Oh!” too, when he saw where Rose was pointing, and in a minute the two children were lying flat on their stomachs staring at the wonderful garden. My! But I wish you could have seen how wonderful it was. I must try to tell you how it looked.

In the first place, the bottom of the basin, the rocky pool in which some of the sea-water had been glad to linger when the rest ran away with the tide,—this bowl was of a brilliant pink, bright as Rose’s own pink cheeks. It was covered with a thick painted coating like coral, and I suppose some kind of little animal like a coral-creature had made it so. In the next place, up from the pinkness grew tiny plants of seaweed, green and brown and yellow, branching and spreading out like little trees and bushes, and waving in the water just as trees do in the wind. Among the seaweed lived pink and purple and yellow starfish and little crawling periwinkles carrying their shell houses upon their backs. Here and there a funny little hermit-crab scuttled busily about, keeping tightly hold of the shell which he had stolen to be his home. Among the leaves of the seaweed trees Rose spied a tiny conger eel moving to and fro, waving his fins as though they were wings, this queer ocean bird!

But what made Kenneth and Rose cry “Oh, oh, oh!” three times out loud and clap their hands with joy, was the living flowers.

Living flowers! You have read in fairy-books about flowers that came alive? But this is no fairy-story, and these flowers were real, truly live flowers,—flowers that were happy and hungry, that ate and drank and moved, opening and closing whenever they chose.