sea-weed to a sailor’s yarn, or a fish-story. In this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled. One species of kelp, according to Bory St. Vincent, has a stem fifteen hundred feet long, and hence is the longest vegetable known, and a brig’s crew spent two days to no purpose collecting the trunks of another kind cast ashore on the Falkland Islands, mistaking it for drift-wood. (See Harvey on _Algæ_) This species looked almost edible; at least, I thought that if I were starving I would try it. One sailor told me that the cows ate it. It cut like cheese: for I took the earliest opportunity to sit down and deliberately whittle up a fathom or two of it, that I might become more intimately acquainted with it, see how it cut, and if it were hollow all the way through. The blade looked like a broad belt, whose edges had been quilled, or as if stretched by hammering, and it was also twisted spirally. The extremity was generally worn and ragged from the lashing of the waves. A piece of the stem which I carried home shrunk to one quarter of its size a week afterward, and was completely covered with crystals of salt like frost. The reader will excuse my greenness,—though it is not sea-greenness, like his, perchance,—for I live by a river-shore, where this weed does not wash up. When we consider in what meadows it grew. and how it was raked, and in what kind of hay weather got in or out, we may well be curious about it. One who is weatherwise has given the following account of the matter. “When descends on the Atlantic The gigantic Storm-wind of the equinox, Landward in his wrath he scourges The toiling surges, Laden with sea-weed from the rocks. “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; “From the trembling surf that buries The Orkneyan Skerries. Answering the hoarse Hebrides; And from wrecks and ships and drifting Spars, uplifting On the desolate rainy seas; “Ever drifting, drifting, drifting On the shifting Currents of the restless main.” But he was not thinking of this shore, when he added:— “Till, in sheltered coves and reaches Of sandy beaches, All have found repose again.” _These_ weeds were the symbols of those grotesque and fabulous thoughts which have not yet got into the sheltered coves of literature. “Ever drifting, drifting, drifting On the shifting Currents of the restless heart,” _And not yet_ “in books recorded They, like hoarded Household words, no more depart.”