Page:The aquarium - an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea.djvu/267

CHAPTER X.

 

"Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,
With fry innumerable swarm: . . . .
. . . . . part single or with mate
Graze the sea-weed their pasture, and through groves
Of coral stray; or, sporting with quick glance,
Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropp'd with gold."

Milton.

 

THE TRUMPET LUCERNARIA.

The summer was over, but I still lingered at Weymouth. Spring-tides came and went with tantalizing regularity; but, though the sea receded far below the lowest level reached in summer, it was almost unavailable to me. Day after day I used to go down and look upon the ledges, but fierce autumnal gales blew with characteristic violence and pertinacity, and huge seas rolled in, sweeping over the flats, shooting up in forcible jets from the fissures, and laying bare for a moment large tracts of inviting sea-weeds, only to cover them the next a fathom deep.

In a brief interval of gentleness, however, I found an animal which had long been an object of desire to me, a normal form of the genus Lucernaria. The small, aberrant, vase-like species, L. cyathiformis, I had taken already; but I wished to see the more elegant sorts, which resemble in figure the trumpet-shaped flower of a Convolvulus, representations of which by