"See my child" says the young mother, "at our approach the motionless ones remain, but the quicker have fled. Now see, they take courage again. The active shrimp, with its fine feelers, rainbowed by the water, creates a great commotion in that mimic and miniature sea, and the slow and hesitating sea spider, at once timid and daring, saves herself by ascending to the warm surface, and the crab advancing and surveying, suddenly returns into his miniature forest of sea weed. "But what do I see now? What _is_ that? A large, motionless shell suddenly takes life, and moves. Oh, but that is not natural, and the impostor betrays himself by his awkward gait and his many stumbles. Yes, yes, we detect you now, you most cunning of all cunning crabs, Sir Bernard the Hermit, who would fain pass yourself off for an innocent mollusc! Your bad conscience agitates you too much." On the shore of our ocean, strangers to these movements, the animated flowers expand their corollæ. Near to the heavy anemone those charming little annelides appear in the sunlight. From a tortuous tube rises a disc, an umbrella, white or lilac, sometimes flesh color. Thrown, itself, a little on one side, it casts off from itself an object which has nothing comparable to it in the whole vegetable world. Not one of these is like its sister, and all are admirable for their velvety delicacy. See one of them, without umbrella, which throws off a whole cloud of light cottony threads, scarcely tinted with a silver grey, while five longer filets are of the richest cherry color. They wave, they entwine, they untwist, and their silvery heads form beautiful images in the water. To the coarse senses of man, such a sight as that would suggest no serious thought; but to the nervous and delicate woman, it is much. At those colors, by turns flashing and fading, she reflects on her own young life that now flashes, now fades, and now threatens to expire. Affecting thought! Again she looks into the pretty miniature Ocean of a few feet square, and there she better discerns Nature, the fertile mother, but the stern mother too. And our fair patient is plunged into an oppressive reverie. Woman would cease to be woman, that is to say, the charm of the world, if she had not that touching gift of _Tenderness for everything that lives_; _pity, and loving tears_.