What a life that was! They soared over restless waves on scarcely-moving wings, swooping low and dropping where the flash of fins proclaimed a feast. They circled tiny bays whose seaweed carpets clothed the floors in rainbow hues; or rode like fairy craft upon the ever-rolling breakers on the shelving shores. When fierce winds blew, they wheeled and screamed like spirits of the storm, laughing to see the surface of the sea torn up and flung against the high coast rocks.
Slowly, as the months rolled by, the little Red-bill's feathers changed from mottled brown to pearly grey and shining white; scarlet flamed on bill and feet. The full bright beauty of his kind was on him.
Mating season came. "Little love," he said to his chosen one, "I know an island where our egg will be safe and our baby sheltered. There, where white waves sing and dance all day, he shall be loved and tended as I was loved and tended."
II.—THE SEA-SQUIRT WHO STOOD ON HIS HEAD
Far out into the waters of a quiet bay stretched a wooden jetty, old and rotting and scarcely ever used. The browned and blackened timbers that showed above the water-line were by no means beautiful, but at their feet was fairyland. Here, in pale green clearness, forests of delicate seaweeds bent their gold and amber beads to the gentle movement of the water; swift-finned fishes, gay in scarlet and silver and bronze, swam the forest pathways and chased each other in and out cool shaded bowers beneath the filmy branches; most beautiful of all, myriads of long-tubed sea-squirts waved their pink and crimson balls from the jetty piles, like great closed poppies in the sea.
How they waved! Up and down, backwards and forwards. Not moved by the water, but moving in the water, though never freed from the jetty piles. After all, these were not flowers, but animals.
Continually they opened their pink, round mouths to let the water pass through their bodies, in the hope that each fresh mouthful might contain a meal. Again and again, squirt! They were forced to throw out some fragment of shell or rock which had floated in and caused annoyance.
At the foot of one pile there was some excitement, for a baby sea-squirt was setting out to see the world. He was impatient to be off, but his mother was giving him a great deal of advice. If you had seen him lying in the water you would never have recognised him as the sea-squirt's son. No mother and son were ever more unlike. She was big, with a thick-skinned tube half a yard long, and a ball at the top shaped like a quince; he was tiny and soft, and looked like a baby tadpole. She was gaily coloured; he was colourless and jelly-like. She was fixed to the jetty pile; he could swim. Yet, in spite of these great differences, mother and son they were.
"Dear child," she said, "whatever you do, never stand on your head."