‘They do look just like jelly,’ said Alice, ‘raspberry jelly, I think.’
‘But jelly doesn’t have “stingers,”’ objected Sally, keeping a respectful distance from the jellyfish’s long, waving ‘arms,’ that would ‘sting like a bee,’ she told her friends, if they went too near.
‘Here is a sea anemone,’ said Father, pointing to a rose-colored, star-shaped form lying in a pool.
‘It looks like a flower,’ said Alice.
And so it did.
‘Touch it gently,’ said Father to Andy, who carried a little stick.
Very carefully Andy leaned over the pool, very gently he touched the anemone, and in an instant what had looked like a full-blown, brilliant flower now grew smaller and smaller, until it was not half its former size.
‘I don’t want to touch it,’ said Alice, her hands behind her back, ‘but I do want to fish. Miss Neppy said that if I brought a fish home she would cook it for my dinner.’
Now Alice and Sally and Andy had come down to the rocks this morning quite prepared to catch any number of fish.
Each one had a fishing rod made of a lilac switch out by Father from the white-lilac bush that grew beside Sally’s kitchen door. And each one had fastened to the rod a long piece of string, on the end of which was tied a bent pin.