A BIT OF SPONGE
(Written on Scotland.)
(From Glimpses of Nature.)
By A. WILSON.
This morning, despite the promise of rain over-night, has broken with all the signs and symptoms of a bright July day. The Firth is bathed in sunlight, and the wavelets at full tide are kissing the strand, making a soft musical ripple as they retire, and as the pebbles run down the sandy slope on the retreat of the waves. Beyond the farthest contact of the tide is a line of seaweed dried and desiccated, mixed up with which, in confusing array, are masses of shells, and such olla podrida of the sea.
Tossed up at our very feet is a dried fragment of sponge, which doubtless the unkind waves tore from its rocky bed. It is not a large portion of sponge this, but its structure is nevertheless to be fairly made out, and some reminiscences of its history gleaned, for the sake of occupying the by no means "bad half-hour" before breakfast. "What is a sponge?" is a question which you may well ask as a necessary preliminary to the understanding of its personality.