Lord Dolphin

by Harriet A. Cheever

Perhaps you did not know that there are fair and beautiful gardens in my watery home. You may have picked up sprays or bunches of seaweed when running along the beach, and some were perhaps quite pretty, while others had turned brown and looked much like leather.

Would you like to come with Lord Dolphin and take a swim through an ocean garden? You would doubtless see such a sight as you had never dreamed could be seen down in the blue water.

All right, I'll turn into a fairy godfather, clap you on to my back, give you the lungs of a mermaid, to prevent your choking in the water, and then, come on! Or, rather, I should say, come down!

"Why, why! A fairylike scene indeed!" you cry.

Now you have not taken on "the evil eye" in coming to the bottom of the sea, but you have taken a "fish eye." Folks usually hate fishy eyes, but no matter, you couldn't see the first thing down here with your own natural peepers, so be thankful that for a time you can see with eyes like mine.

Now, this is not a coral grove, it is a garden of flowers, and when you exclaim again, "Oh, but I had no idea of this!" I should have to reply, "Of course you hadn't; no more had I of the strange and beautiful things on the land, until I had to live there a little while."

Folks call these flowers, such as they have seen of them, weeds, seaweeds. And I suppose they have to come under that name, as they are not planted from seeds, but are a wild growth. Ah, but some great Planter or Gardener surely put all these wonderful shapes and splendid tints in the soft earth of a sea-garden. And it is all so blithe and gay!

Here are nearly all the shapes in bushes and almost trees that you have in your garden on land. And as to flowers, there are leaves, spires, cups, bells, tassels, very much such as you see in your garden at home.

See these beautiful crimson leaves, as large as the top of a small table, and cut in such fine, even scallops around the edges, and here is one with a great pad of yellow right on the crimson. My! My! is it not colored richly?

Here are leaves shooting out like rafts, thick, like the leaves of a rubber-tree, but larger and of a deep red. You might take a sail on one of them. And here is a bush, shooting upright from its muddy bed, all covered with pink sprays, on which are pink blossoms. Doesn't it make you think of a syringa bush? Only these flowers are pink.