Old Neptune's garden contains as wonderful plants as any above high-water mark, though the latter do well with less watering. I have thought the botany of the sea worth studying, and, as it is sometimes inconvenient to pluck a plant or a flower when you want it, the beach is the place for specimens. Some years ago delicate sea-mosses were in request. They were kept in albums, pressed like autumn leaves, or displayed in frames on the walls at home. It was a pretty conceit, and employed many leisure fingers at the sea-side, but appears to have been discarded of late.
One day, during a storm, I went down to the beach, to find it encumbered with "devils' apron" and kelp, whitening where it lay. I picked up a plant having a long stalk, slender and hollow, of more than ten feet in length, resembling a gutta-percha tube. The root was firmly clasped around five deep-sea mussels, while the other end terminated in broad, plaited leaves. It had been torn from its bed in some sea-cranny, to be combined with terrestrial vegetation; but to the mussels it was equal whether they died of thirst or of the grip of the talon-like root of the kelp. There were tons upon tons of weed and moss, which the farmers were pitching with forks higher up the beach, out of reach of the sea, the kelp, as it was being tossed about, quivering as if there were life in it. I found the largest mass of sponge I have ever seen on shore—as big as a man's head—and was at a loss how to describe it, until I thought of the mops used on shipboard, and made of rope-yarns; for this body of sponge was composed of slender branches of six to twelve inches in length, each branching again, coral-like, into three or four offshoots. The pores were alive with sand-fleas, who showed great partiality for it.
What at first seems paradoxical is, that with the wind blowing directly on shore, the kelp will not land, but is kept just beyond the surf by the under-tow; it requires an inshore wind to bring it in. One who has walked on the beach weaves of its sea-weed a garland:
"From Bermuda's reefs, from edges
Of sunken ledges,
On some far-off, bright Azore;
From Bahama and the dashing,
Silver-flashing
Surges of San Salvador:"
"Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless main."
I had before walked round the cape one way, and now, passing it from a contrary direction, had fairly doubled it. After leaving York Beach I pushed on for Old York, finding little to arrest my steps, until at night-fall I arrived at the harbor, after a twenty-mile tramp, with an appetite that augured ill for mine host.
It was not my first visit to Old York, but I found the place strangely altered from its usual quiet and dullness. The summer, as Charles Lamb says, had set in with its usual severity, and I saw fishers in varnished boots, boatmen in tight-fitting trowsers, and enough young Americans in navy blue to man a fleet by-and-by. Parasols fluttered about the fields, and silks swept the wet floor of the beach. I had examined with a critical eye as I walked the impressions of dainty boots in the sand, keeping step with others of more masculine shape, and marked where the pace had slackened or quickened, and where the larger pair had diverged for a moment to pick up a stone or a pebble, or perchance in hurried self-communing for a question of mighty import. Sometimes the foot-prints diverged not to meet again, and I saw the gentleman had walked off with rapid strides in the opposite direction. For hours on the beach I had watched these human tracks, almost as devious as the bird's, until I fancied I should know their makers. Not unfrequently I espied a monogram, traced with a stick or the point of a parasol, the lesser initials lovingly twined about the greater. Faith! I came to regard the beach itself as a larger sort of tablet graven with hieroglyphics, easy to decipher if you have the key.
The hotel[72] appeared deserted, but it was only a seclusion of calculation. After supper the guests set about what I may call their usual avocations. Not a few "paired off," as they say at Washington, for a walk on the beach, springing down the path with elastic step and voices full of joyous mirth. One or two maidens I had seen rowing on the river showed blistered hands to condoling cavaliers. Young matrons, carefully shawled by their husbands, sauntered off for a quiet evening ramble, or mingled in the frolic of the juveniles going on in the parlor. The dowagers all sought a particular side of the house, where, out of ear-shot of the piano, they solaced themselves with the evening newspapers, damp from presses sixty miles away. A few choice spirits gathered in the smoking-room, where they maintained a frigid reserve toward all new-comers, their conversation coming out between puffs, as void of warmth as the vapor that rises from ice. On the beach, and alone with inanimate objects, I had company enough and to spare; here, with a hundred of my own species, it was positively dreary. I took a turn on the piazza, and soon retired to my cell; for in these large caravansaries man loses his individuality and becomes a number.