The sea, moreover, labours to help the land in other ways, some of them singular enough. Many thousands of poor unproductive acres have, in these last ten years, been rendered rich and fertile by supplies of GUANO. And whence did we get the guano? why, from the sea-fowl, and from a barren rock in the bosom of the seas! This is no trifling benefit to reap from the “desert sea.”
What a beautiful thing is glass, and how indispensable it has become to us! Perhaps no other material can be insured to be perfectly clean and pure for drinking out of. For many years our glass-works depended mainly upon a constant supply of kelp from the Orkneys, and even now they cannot dispense with the sea-sand.
The porcelain mills in Staffordshire and elsewhere are very glad to obtain a cartload of pebbles from the beach. These go to the “crushing” department; and if among them there are, as there are pretty sure to be, a dozen lumps of chalcedony, the material of the next batch of teacups will be unusually fine, provided some one who understands them picks the stones first. Indeed, if I had no preferable occupation in this world, I have often thought I would collect the rough agates and chalcedonies from sundry localities I wot of, and fabricate a biscuit of my own, as the king of Saxony does at Meissen. But though I have not the leisure for this, others may have; and so I mention it here.
Especially I incline to think that a splendid kind of “Wedgewood” ware would result from the crushing of certain jaspers, for I suppose their colours would not fade in the furnace.
Then, the seaside visit, I must not omit to mention, can be enlivened by sundry local pursuits and amusements. Besides the pleasures of a sailing-boat, and a run with the “dredge” and the “dipping-net,” there is the exciting march of the Shrimper, knee-deep in the wave, pushing the hoop-net before him, and every now and then halting to fill his front pocket with the silvery jumpers. If there are rocks near at hand, there will be lobster-pots to visit; and the habits and deportment of a live lobster are among the most curious in creation. In agility and cunning he surpasses even a salmon. Also, for the benefit of those who at all regard what they eat—and he who disregards it is a goose—I may just venture to hint that a real lobster-salad (London confectioners have a way of selling sham ones,) is a dish worthy their serious attention: Barclay’s stout being not a bad accompaniment.
But the above will sound to some persons too “Epicurean.” O gentle reader, do you love moonlight? and if you have ever admired the reflection of that planet in a lake or river, what will you say to it when you contemplate it in Sandown Bay? Culver on one side, looking as if it were of green glass, and the cliffs of Shanklin on the other resembling walls and pillars of porphyry! Or is your taste for the sterner beauty of storms and angry seas? Then visit Blackgang Chine late in winter, and you may “sup full of horrors.” The appearance of the waves below, as they come in over that fatal “race,” and the aspect of the earth and the heavens above, when the lightning darts from “St. Catherine’s head” and sweeps like a destroying Angel down the chasm of the Chine, yield together perhaps the grandest picture of desolation and terror that English scenery ever shows.
There are persons still living who are unwilling to speak of the fearful tempest they witnessed on that coast when the Clarendon was lost.
Lastly, to return to our “pebbles,” the sea is an indefatigable agent in the partly mechanical, partly chemical, work of infiltration; a process to which both the fine texture and varied colours of these agatized fossils are mainly due.
But of this I must treat in the chapter which follows.