like the Roman capital letter B; but these are artisans, “coaxed and dandled into eminence.” The normal species of Troglodyte are clothed in tints of buff, grey, black, white, and red; and from the time they come out like buds from the parent stem, little miniature creations from a pin’s head and upwards, who seat themselves on the soft, crumbling sandstone, or in the sand expand their saucy tentacles, and wait with exemplary patience for the morsel that will get a blessing with the rest, they are the architects of their own fortunes; for Troglodyte increases his possessions with his years, and a sandstone specimen who attains a diameter of an inch in column, two inches in the expanse of flower, and two inches and a half in height, may justly be termed a very Cyclops—or more aptly, self-made man of his race. With leathery construction, and constitution vigorous and healthy, Troglodyte is like the genus man, who must be sustained by food, or it will degenerate, and die.
“Ye who are wealthy a lesson learn,
Hear what the blessed Jesus said —
Give us each day our daily bread,
And drive out want from the poor man's shed.”
It seems hard to force Troglodyte to emigrate from his comfortable home, but as he is a classical animal, an island home is, after all, well suited to him; consequently he bears his translation with the calmness and contentment of a mind easily pleased and grateful for small blessings, and lives a settled domestic life, occasionally giving way to a fit of apathy and flatness, but coming out afterwards decked in neatest trimmest attire, and with renewed vigour and appetite, ready to exclaim with Ulysses, “I will drink life to the lees.”
SAGARTIA BELLIS, THE DAISY ANEMOME.
Sagartia bellis, with straight, ungraceful column and flattened disc, dotted, not fringed, with tentacula, in the ensemble resembles a salver on a stalk, without a foot; and in pink and purple column, and disc beautiful in its hues of black, white, grey and blue—in scarlet pencillings and clear brown, white, and pink—or almost wholly white—reminds one of the awkward, stupid clown dressed out in holiday attire, for Bellis is a Sagart who loves the mud, and, like many of our poor brethren, thrives and grows apace in an atmosphere redolent of fumes, to say the least, not grateful to our olfactory nerves; for while there are varieties of the tribe who, like Rubicunda and Lilacina Troglodyte, are beautiful and elegant in form, and dwell in homes where “the pure and clear element gently is laving,” yet the Weymouth Bellis, in yellow wainscot-hued column and black, white, and grey freckled disc, and the Cornish, love to congregate in the slimy mud. Here they and their enormous families of little ones grow sleek and fat, laughing at care and its sister evils, for “He who made all things for His glory” provideth for them. “It is good to be contented,” says Bellis, when you transplant him to a pure atmosphere. “I am cosmopolitan enough to be able to live anywhere, where such life as I have can be;” and so he accepts the morsels that fall to his share—chooses a residence which he seldom changes, gives no trouble, allows his arms to rust in their case, and drinking Lethe, says, “Oh, rest, ye brother mariners, we will not wander more.”
I have many more pets in my microcosm. There are Devonshire Cup Corals, Carophyllia Smithii, who dwell in shelly homes and eat voraciously, but gratefully dress afterwards in white and pink, with, on rare occasions comparatively, a green brooch at their mouth; Balanophyllia Regia, the yellow Ilfracombe Cup Coral, who chokes over his morsel, like the old and toothless; Corynactis viridus, in my opinion but one degree removed from the Sagart Anemones, in sea-green garb, and a fringing of pinkish purple tentacula on footstalks, make pale fair stars to be admired, but clinging to their victims with a grasp that cannot be easily shaken off, and devouring like very cannibals; Serpula contortuplicata, who run up their winding staircases, on fifteen hundred legs, to come and exhibit their gorgeous and truly beautiful scarlet, or scarlet and white, and crimson fans and stoppers, seem to see without eyes, and vanish as quick as lightning. And lastly, there are pretty painted prawns, tame vivacious creatures, who row their pliers at our approach, and beseechingly seek for a “bit piece” with the pertinacity and humour of any black-eyed roving little “Arab” of bonnie Scotland; but for the present I have finished.
PITY THE SORROWS OF A POOR BLIND MAN!
So I did. Who could help it! He was, to all appearance, not only blind, but perfectly helpless: an old man with a white head, and limbs all cramped and stiffened; bearing, placarded on his bosom, the above injunction. Let any one among us, who walks in the sunlight, taking his eyes as matters of course, cover them up for a moment, and think what it would be to grope about in a perpetual darkness,—not that he may give himself a gratulatory hug at his freedom from his neighbour’s affliction, but that, feeling its magnitude he may pity it,—and he too would possibly turn and relieve the sorrows of the poor blind man, as the placard bade him do.
Every morning as I passed his corner I pitied him: that is to say, when I was not looking straight before me into my own business too earnestly to remember his. He never whined—a habit which would have set the teeth of my compassion on edge at once—and he never begged orally; only, he was there. Then I caught myself speculating about him. How did he get to the comer? How did he get away again from it?
A certain writer, instancing a difference between genius and no genius, takes two men passing an overturned waggon. The ordinary man, or no genius, simply sees the wreck before his eyes, while the genius immediately begins to imagine what it used to be, and how it looked before it was overturned. According to that view, let me flatter myself that I must have been a genius, since I got into a habit of making this poor old figure up afresh; calculating what he was like before he went blind; how long his legs had been
