less mass. They are
formed for a different element, and could not nourish under water,
especially salt water.

Just so ocean-flowers, and sea-tints can only live in their own element,
which is not air, but water. And the faces on our water-pansies--for we
have them--would soon fade in what to them would be lifeless air, just
as the garden pansies would lose their bright faces in the salt sea.

Great quantities of seaweeds float ashore and are often dried and used
as fuel, or perhaps are put around garden plants to make them grow.

But nothing that grows on the land, or in the water, can exchange places
one with the other and keep alive. It is all very curious, and more than
I can understand. Yet every creature and every plant is fitted to the
place it grows in, and is natural to it. The food, the flowers, and the
land for the use of Folks, and the food, the plants, and the water for
the use of fishes, are just what the nature of each requires. What
wisdom!

CHAPTER VI.

MY TREASURE GROUNDS

Are you tired? No? Well, that is no great wonder. It is ever so much
easier to glide through the water on the broad back of a great fish than
to ride horseback, or in a car.

My sails or fins flap quietly to and fro, the water parts readily to
make us a path, no rough winds blow away your hat, there is no danger
way down here that a boat will bang against us, and roll you off into a
cavern or a cave.

Now I am taking you into deeper water, which still is not so very deep,
but I want to show you some other strange things in the world I live in.

Here we go sailing in and out of rocks, but do not be alarmed, I know
them all. Perhaps you wonder what it is that we keep pressing against,
something soft and smooth that sends extra sprays of water over us. What
can it be?

Well, now, put on your thinking-cap. What does your mother wash the
baby with? What does Michael wash the carriage with? And what is that
object in the wire holder in the bath-tub?

"Ah, a sponge!" you exclaim. Yes, and here is where they grow. "What,
sponges grow?" you ask. Certainly. And just as with the coral, it took
Folks a long time to find out whether sponges were plants, shrubs, or
insects.

Now it is decided that the sponge is an animal growth. And the same as
with coral, the tiny creature that it starts from dies, and out from the
skeleton, or frame, branches the sponge that sometimes grows very large,
and sometimes is of a kind that rema