The marvelous pools in which they live have no resemblance to the surface of the sea, but suggest the bottom of the deep--limpid, dark and still. Each is a world by itself, inhabited by a strange order of beings: dull nomads, which drift with the waves, or cling, they know not how, to something, they know not what. If there is any event in their life it is the rise of the tide. In all likelihood they do not know our day and night, are not impressed by these phenomena; but the flood is their day, the ebb their night. Small whelk stud the rich background of sea-mosses like precious stones, some gamboge, some orange, others white as marble or banded with black. There are colonies of sertularia tinted a delicate mauve, solitary sea-urchins of heliotrope, and starfish, some luminous pink, others deep rose-madder. These hues are characteristic of sea life, as of lichens and mushrooms and the lower orders in general; not crude colors, red and blue, but delicate gradations. Now and again a single jellyfish, stranded by the receding tide, a spectral diaphanous creature, hovers ghostlike in the liquid atmosphere of his strange world. It is all of an antediluvian and prehistoric character, associated with the beginning of things--with an age of fishes rather than an age of man. The deathless sea takes no note of the flight of time; it still brings forth only brood upon brood of slimy, goggle-eyed things. What a harvest, this of the sea! After a storm all craft put out. The lobstermen in their dories take in the lobster-pots and replenish the bait, while the dory rises and sinks on the long swells. Fleets of mackerel boats and schooners bound for the Banks after cod and haddock creep along the horizon-line. On the beach men rake up the Irish moss, flung ashore in the storm, and spread it on old sails to bleach in the sun. Others haul kelp for the fields, while women gather driftwood. So great a resource is the ocean; so many gleaners there are. The sea is humanized and redeemed somewhat by the presence of these workers. It is agreeable to reflect that while it nourishes them, they in turn do not mar it. Man communicates the character of his mind and aims to the landscape; enriches it by his labor on the farm, and disfigures it again in a thousand ways, till it is as barren and sordid as his own thoughts. But upon the deep he makes no impression. It is virgin ever. It overpowers him by its stern music--lifts him for a time a little above the sordid and commonplace. The sailor ashore is not the same man he is out there. He must needs have courage, for he must meet the sea. Portuguese, Swedes, Finns--poor stuff for poems in their sailor boarding-houses ashore. But hear how they face the winter gales. Learn the actual experience which makes up that life. The sea invests the poorest, meanest man with heroic qualities. That is his stage; there he looms large. Oil-skins and sou'wester are but his make-up.