"Now," said the baby, "come and help me, or I shall not have finished
before my brothers and sisters come, and it is time to go home."

"What shall I help you at?"

"At this poor dear little rock; a great clumsy boulder came rolling by
in the last storm, and knocked all its head off, and rubbed off all its
flowers. And now I must plant it again with seaweeds, and coralline, and
anemones, and I will make it the prettiest little rock-garden on all the
shore."

So they worked away at the rock, and planted it, and smoothed the sand
down round it, and capital fun they had till the tide began to turn. And
then Tom heard all the other babies coming, laughing and singing and
shouting and romping; and the noise they made was just like the noise of
the ripple. So he knew that he had been hearing and seeing the
water-babies all along; only he did not know them, because his eyes and
ears were not opened.

And in they came, dozens and dozens of them, some bigger than Tom and
some smaller, all in the neatest little white bathing dresses; and when
they found that he was a new baby, they hugged him and kissed him, and
then put him in the middle and danced round him on the sand, and there
was no one ever so happy as poor little Tom.

"Now then," they cried all at once, "we must come away home, we must
come away home, or the tide will leave us dry. We have mended all the
broken seaweed, and put all the rock-pools in order, and planted all the
shells again in the sand, and nobody will see where the ugly storm swept
in last week."

And this is the reason why the rock-pools are always so neat and clean;
because the water-babies come inshore after every storm to sweep them
out, and comb them down, and put them all to rights again.

Only where men are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea
instead of putting the stuff upon the fields like thrifty reasonable
souls; or throw herrings' heads and dead dog-fish, or any other refuse,
into the water; or in any way make a mess upon the clean shore--there
the water-babies will not come, sometimes not for hundreds of years (for
they cannot abide anything smelly or foul), but leave the sea-anemones
and the crabs to clear away everything, till the good tidy sea has
covered up all the dirt in soft mud and clean sand, where the
water-babies can plant live cockles and whelks and razor-shells and
sea-cucumbers and golden-combs, and make a pretty live garden again,
after man's dirt is c