And that is how amid the salt bite of the homeless wave there grew the Gardens of the Sea. That is how it came about that the weed trailed in running waters, and the sea-moss swayed in brackish estuaries, and the wrack clung or swam in tangles of olive-brown and green and soft and dusky reds. What a long preamble to the story of how the Seaweeds were once sweet-smelling blooms of the shores and valleys! Of how the flowers of meadow and woodland, of the sun-swept plain and the shadowy hill, had once song as well as sweet odours: how, of these, many lost not only fragrance but innocent beauty: and how out of a rose and a blade of grass and a breath of the wind the first birds were made, the souls of the green earth, winged, and voiced. To-day I sit amongst deep, shelving rocks by the shore, in a desolate place where basaltic cliffs shut away the familiar world, and where, in front, the otherworld of the sea reaches beyond sight to follow the lifted wave against the grey skyline, or is it the grey lip of the fallen horizon? Looking down I can perceive the olive-brown and green seaweed swaying in the slow movement of the tide. Like drifted hair, the long thin filaments of the Mermaid’s Locks (_Chorda Filum_) sinuously twist, intertwine, involve, and unfold. It is as though a seawoman rose and fell, idly swam or idly swung this way and that, asleep on the tide: nothing visible of her wave-grey body but only her long fatal hair, that so many a swimmer has had cause to dread, from whose embrace so many a swimmer has never risen. In the rock-set pools the flesh-hued fans of the dulse indolently stir. Wave-undulated over them are fronds of a lovely green weed, delicate, transparent: above these, two phantom fish, rock-cod or saithe, float motionless. Idly watching, idly dreaming thus, I recall part of a forgotten poem about the woods of the sea, and the finned silent creatures that are its birds: and how there are stags and wolves in these depths, long hounds of the sea, mermen and merwomen and seal-folk. Others, too, for whom we have no name, we being wave-blind and so unable to discern these comers and goers of the shadow. Also, how old sea-divinities lie there asleep, and perilous phantoms come out of sunken ships and ancient weed-grown towns; and how there roams abroad, alike in the flowing wave and along the sheer green-darkening bodiless walls, an incalculable Terror that may be manifold, the cold implacable demons of the deep, or may be One, that grey timeworn Death whom men have called Poseidon and Mananan and by many names.