a; I persuaded a boatman to bring me a bucket of salt-water
from beyond the line of breakers, and I poured it carefully into the
jar. During the next twenty-four hours I waited impatiently for the
water to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates.
I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a
couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or
cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sand and changed
color magically from dark brown to faintest buff. I also had a pair of
soldier-crabs, which fought each other continually. When the sunlight
fell on my aquarium, I saw the silver bubbles of oxygen form on the
green fronds of the sea-weed; the little snails crawled along the sides
of the glass, sweeping out their tiny, scythelike tongues at every step;
the prawns hovered in the shade of the stones or darted back and forward
light as thoughts; the soles scuffled over the surface of the sand or
hid themselves in it from the stalking, felonious crabs. But I had
no sea-anemones; they are not found on sandy coasts, and without
sea-anemones my felicity could not be complete.

But strange things happen in this world occasionally, good as well as
bad. There came up a heavy storm, and the next morning, walking with my
father on the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came
upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it
might have been, as my father remarked, a relic of the Spanish Armada.
And it was covered from end to end with the rarest and most beautiful
species of sea-anemones!

This was fairy-land come true. I chipped off a handkerchiefful of the
best specimens, wishing I could take them all, and carried them to
my aquarium. I deposited them, each in a coign of vantage, and in the
course of an hour or two they had swelled out their tinted bodies and
expanded their lovely tentacles, and the cup of my joy was full. This
prosperity continued for near a week, during which I remained with my
nose against the glass, as the street boys of Liverpool held theirs
against the windows of pastry-cooks' shops. At length I noticed an
ominous clouding of the water, which, as Mr. Gosse had forewarned me,
signified disaster of some sort, and, searching for the cause, I finally
discovered the body of the little sepiola, which had died without being
missed, and was contaminating with his decay the purity of the aquarium.
The water