The hard statistics make short lives of many species, while the sun and sea keep their steady and infinite relationship. There is a quality of sacrifice in all life. Nothing is spared in its duration, and at the same time in the uniqueness of its making, as the fires burn. The results of evolution may seem haphazard in many respects, and the processes of nature to involve enormous waste; but natural continuity holds all things in high honor, through the fine balances of life and death. The forms of fish or tern, with their own transmutations of energy, are as excellent as they are perishable. The tides run the channels with an almost sentient, purling calm during the burning days of summer and early fall. They lift into marshy shores and over sandy flats, and then subside. Sometimes the fog comes on in the afternoon and the deep foghorn groans through sheets of silver under the wind, a low curtain moving on and parting slightly here and there, the sunlight showing intermittently. Tiny black snails move over the flats at low tide, some absolutely still, others moving slightly with black antennae protruding and their feet probing forward. Small fish dart in the pools and hover in the tidal currents. There is an over-all mewing, chuckling, and crying, with an occasional “huh, huh” from a gull flying slowly overhead, as the light shifts with the breath of wind over water. Gray and white ring-billed and herring gulls, occasional laughing gulls with black heads and red legs, and terns, preen, stalk, stand off in the distance, and fly up intermittently. Ringed plovers run hurriedly forward over the sands and through the shallows. A yellowlegs, tall and limber, stalks, bobs, and probes along an edge of the shore. Black-bellied plovers, big-headed, short-billed, stocky by comparison, trot through the waters, standing up straight at intervals, while the yellowlegs suddenly races back and forth on its hunt for food, turning back on its shadow. These shore birds fly off fast when disturbed, crying out, the black-bellied plover with a sweet whistle of its own. Gentle rising and falling of the tide over ribs of sand; swirling fogs; burning sun with spokes slanting down through clouds over the rim of the world, letting in calm soft lights, green and pink and pearly across sand and rivulets and pools, or cruelly glittering diamonds over the water. Light and water and wings flow in and flow past, the motion of ages, all actions being synchronized, as the hovering and diving of the tern is synchronized with the fish it catches, part of the indefinite combinations of things in a universe of motion. Over these waters and receptive sands life crawls or flies, dives, halts, stops, and starts, wildly, with quick hearts beating, or scarcely a heart at all, blind, or vibrant with sight, probing with accuracy and speed or merely moving at random.