His friends and playfellows on the shore saw his thoughtful looks, for they all looked to him and loved him as their joy and crown, their darling and their little King; and they often consulted together how they could give him his wish.
CHAPTER V.
One calm bright morning, when the Child had been busy rendering services to many of his sea friends, who had lost their way or had been roughly treated by the waves, he came to rest himself by the rock-pool. There a great surprise and delight awaited him. A large volute, nearly related to some of his friends the whelks, had entangled his shell among some long fronds of floating sea-weed: with him were swimming two creatures, very beautiful, but strangers to the Child, and the whole formed a little fairy raft, ready to take him out to the deep sea!
He understood it at once; his face flushed crimson with pleasure and gratitude, and for a moment his voice was choked so that he could not speak, for he thought, "Now I shall learn the words of the Song."
Then he clapped his hands and laughed aloud for joy, and thanked all the creatures, and seated himself on the sea-weed, buoyed up by its air-bladders, with one hand clasped round the volute, and the other laid on the strange spiral shell.
Thousands of the sand-borers of the sabella family thrust out their feathered heads to see him start, the hairy crab and many of his brothers glared after him with their eager eyes, and even the rock-borers—the hard-working pholases—crept out to the mouth of their dens to watch him.
"I shall soon come back to you," said the Child; "and then we will sing the Song together."
So the shell-fish plied their oars, and the other transparent creature spread its sail, and they and the Child floated away together.
The Child wished to know something of his new companions before he lost sight of all his old friends, so he politely asked them who they were.
One of them had a crystal body spotted with dark blue, from which many little fingers shot down into the water and played about like oars, whilst above rose a lovely little transparent sail, catching the breeze.