I am sitting alone in my wigwam. This pretty and romantic snuggery stands not anywhere near the forests of the Far West, nor by the banks of the broad Susquehana, nor on alkali plain, or rolling prairie, nor, despite its name, anywhere in the Red man’s country at all. It is built on a green knoll in my orchard, down in bonnie Berks. An old well-thumbed log lies before me.
It is the month of February, and the cold winds moan carelessly through the black and gloomy Scotch pines out yonder, and through the lordly poplars, tall and bare, with a sound that carries one’s thoughts seaward.
I read but a line or two of the dear old log, and lo! the scene is changed, the inky pine-trees, the weird and leafless poplars, the solemn cypresses and drooping yews, grow indistinct and fade away—the very wind itself is hushed. I am back once more in the Indian Ocean, and my Arab boat is quietly gliding over a calm unruffled sea of bright translucent blue.
It is a day that would make a man of ninety years of age feel life in every limb. Was ever sky so bright before I wonder, was ever sea so warm, so soft, so smooth—was ever air so fresh and balmy? The very sea-birds seem to have gone to sleep, and to be dreaming happy dreams, as they float, rising and falling on the gently heaving water.
Revooma, my boy or boatman—everybody has a boy as a kind of body servant who goes gipsying all alone on this lovely seaboard—Revooma, I say, holds the sculls, and I am dreamily steering.
“Gently, R’ooma, gently,” I murmur. “Nay, never row so fast; the day is all before us, to do with as we will. Let the oars touch the water in silence. I would hear nothing harsher than the dripping of the water from their blades, or musical rhythm of rowlock. Now, R’ooma, pause—nay, draw in your oars; we are a good way off yon coral island shore, yet see, we are in water that is almost shoal. Now, look overboard, R’ooma, down through the glassy water to the ocean’s bed. Can’t you, R’ooma, even you, admire that? You do. Is there anything so lovely on shore, R’ooma—anything else so lovely in Nature? I’m a poet, am I? Thank you; but look again, do not talk, but look; have your fill of the gorgeous beauty of that submarine garden, I will, R’ooma. And years and years after this, perhaps, when lying on a sick-bed, I will have but to close my eyes, and that sight will return to cheer me. Have ever you seen flowers that grow on earth like these? Why! every moving—for move they do, as if a gentle wind were for ever stirring them—every moving leaflet, twiglet, twig, or stem, is a flower in itself—alive with light and colour combined. Are they really weeds, or are they living things? Then, look at those anemones. What splendid tints! What gorgeous colouring!
“What a bright, white, clear patch of sand this is down here, R’ooma! How distinctly everything can be seen. See, I drop this pin, and it wriggles, wriggles, wriggles all the way to the bottom, and yonder it lies; somewhat distorted, I admit, but still it is the pin all the same. Look at that black, wrinkled claw, R’ooma, appearing from under the edge of yonder coral rock. And now the body slowly follows, and a strange-shaped, spider-legged, warty old crab stalks forth. How hideously ugly he is, R’ooma; and this very hideousness, I verily believe, is his defence against his foes. But watch him, boy; what is he going to do? He paws the sand. He stamps on it. Is it possible, R’ooma, he is about to dance a kind of a submarine Ghillie Callum? O, but look about a yard ahead now. See the white silvery sand gently, so gently, moved. And the white, warty crab stops dancing and listens, and rolls his stalky eyes around, Handy to have eyes on stalks, you say? You’re right, R’ooma. But, behold, our warty friend has beaten a hasty retreat to his cave, and up from the sand appears another, a facsimile of the first—only more ugly, more warty, and more hideous still. They have been playing at hide-and-seek, R’ooma. That is all just a little game to pass the summer’s day away.
“But, while we have been looking at the antics of these crabs, we have not been noticing the hundred and one other beautiful things that are floating about. Plenty of fishes down there, R’ooma; but we haven’t seen a very large one yet. Lovely in colours all they are, especially those strange, wee, flat fish that sail on an even keel, and are more gaudy in colour than a goldfinch; but most of them are ridiculously grotesque in shape. I am quite certain of one thing, R’ooma, none of them can have very much sense of fun or humour, else they would laugh at each other till they split their sides, and floated dead on the top of the water. Yonder, look, goes a whole flotilla of jelly-fishes, as big as parasols; and watch how the bright blue or crimson light scintillates from their limbs as they kick and float. And here comes a fleet of quite another shape, so far as their tentacles are concerned. Most independent gentlemen these are at sea, R’ooma, and I wouldn’t catch one for the Queen; but when stranded on a lee-shore, they are about the most helpless creatures in the universe. The little nigger boys kick them about, and they soon look more like a dish-cloth rolled in sand than anything alive. I’ve got them out to sea again, after such rough experience of shore-going life as I couldn’t have believed even a jelly-fish capable of surviving, and have seen them revive, and float, and put away to sea once more, with the trifling loss, of perhaps one or more limbs or tentacles.
“They tell me, R’ooma, that those medusae, or jelly-fishes, have hardly any nervous system, but they have very large heads, if they haven’t brains. They always put me in mind of dishonest lawyers, these medusae—they kick and sting for a livelihood. They live on little fishes. They throw out so many feelers all around them, that they are sure to inveigle some small, unwary innocents; and when they do—well, then, I’m sorry for the fishes. But when the medusae, or the lawyer, gets shoaled himself, he is a very pitiless object indeed; all the little fishes gather round, wag their heads or their tails, as the case may be, but no one is a bit sorry for him.