Farther up the beach, out of danger from the waves, I came upon a large sand-flea hopping along energetically. I sat down to head him off, and find what he was about. With his hard-shelled and rounded back he looked like a small model of some prehistoric and armored monster—only he had two very mild blue eyes. As soon as I tried to intercept him with a piece of dried marsh-grass he put his head down and dug so vigorously that he was soon covered with sand.
His disappearance left me alone. It was a lonely place, that beach, for the peanut-man and the merry-go-round had not discovered it, and its only inhabitants were a few cottagers, like our family, and the fishermen.
But I did not miss the crowd. A few minutes' walk farther down the beach brought me to a point of sand that ran out into the ocean for fifty or sixty yards at low tide. At the end it curved around and enclosed a small salt-water pond.
This was an enchanted spot.
In the first place, it was the very kind of a pond for "going in wading." That mysterious and dangerous thing called the undertow, which lived among the breakers, had no influence in these quiet waters. Then, along the edges could be found, more than anywhere else, all kinds of interesting shells and sea creatures. There were large white shells, well adapted for scooping holes in the sand, and smaller, roundish cockle-shells whose inmates were usually at home. When you picked up one of them the cockle retired inside and drew a trap-door over the entrance.
There were starfish with waving tentacles, sand-dollars, and the empty shells of sea-urchins and razor-clams. The black and ominous-looking objects which I implicitly believed to be sharks' eggs were often found near the borders of that ocean pond, and horseshoe crabs crawled darkly beneath its surface or lay dry and deceased on the sand.
Some rocks, covered with seaweed, sheltered a colony of ordinary crabs—little ones, who scuttled away as you approached, and big, dignified, ferocious veterans, who looked up at you defiantly and blew a multitude of bubbles, though whether they did this through wrath and indignation, or merely with the conscious joy of the artist, I could never discover.
These rocks were also the haunt of sea-gulls, who took flight before you could come close to them. The sandpipers were more neighborly, skipping along the beach in front of you, though even they were shy and wary.
The waves brought up many charming varieties of seaweed, red, green, and brown. Beautiful enough it looked in the water; the disappointment came when you took it out.
Besides all these living or growing things, each high tide cast up on the sands an assortment of fascinating objects—pebbles of odd shapes and colors, smooth bits of wood rounded by the waves, spindles and spools that had come down the river from the mills of far-away towns, and bottles which always looked as if they were going to contain a message from some ship-wrecked mariner—but never did.