"No, but here is one of their flower-gardens. Bend down and look into this pool."
She bent and looked. The first thing she saw was her own exquisite face, and Sam's brown phiz peering over her shoulder. A golden tress of hair, loosened by the sea breeze, fell down into the water, and had to be looped up again. Then gazing down once more, she saw beneath the crystal water a bed of flowers; dahlias, ranunculuses, carnations, chrysanthemums, of every colour in the rainbow save blue. She gave a cry of pleasure: "What are they, Doctor? What do you call them?"
"Sea anemones, in English, I believe," said the Doctor, "actinias, serpulas, and sabellas. You may see something like that on the European coasts, on a small scale, but there is nothing I ever have seen like that great crimson fellow with cream-coloured tentacles. I do not know his name. I suspect he has never been described. The common European anemone they call 'crassicornis' is something like him, but not half as fine."
"Is there any means of gathering and keeping them, Doctor?" asked Sam. "We have no flowers in the garden like them."
"No possible means," said the Doctor. "They are but lumps of jelly. Let us come away and get round the headland before the tide comes in."
They wandered on from cove to cove, under the dark cliffs, till rounding a little headland the Doctor called out,—
"Here is something in your Cornish style, Halbert."
A thin wall of granite, like a vast buttress, ran into the sea, pierced by a great arch, some sixty feet high. Aloft all sharp grey stone: below, wherever the salt water had reached, a mass of dark clinging weed: while beyond, as though set in a dark frame, was a soft glimpse of blue sky and snow-white seabirds.
"There is nothing so grand as that in Cornwall, Doctor," said Halbert.
"Can we pass under it, Mr. Barker?" said Alice. "I should like to go through; we have been into none of the caves yet."