m its hold and load their dories
with its golden-brown masses. Then they bring it ashore and spread
it out in the sun as the farmers do their hay, that it may dry and
bleach. Just as the salt hay, touched for a brief happy hour at
each tide with the cool strength of the sea, retains the flavor of
it always, so the Irish moss that grows in the depths and is
hardly awash at the lowest of the ebb, overflows with it and is so
bursting with this fragrance of the unknown that no change that
comes to it can drive it out. When the wind is off-shore and you
may not scent the sea, when the sun bakes the hot sand and dries
the blood so that it seems as if the only way to prolong life is
to wade out neck deep in the surges and there stay until the wind
comes from the east again, you have but to go to the leeward of
these piles of bleaching carragheen to find it giving forth the
same cooling fragrance which the tides have made a part of its
structure. You may take this moss home with you and cook it, but
the heat of your fire will no more destroy its essence than did
the heat of the sun, and in your first mouthful of the produce,
which may in appearance give no hint of its origin, you taste the
cool sea depths and feel yourself nourished as if with some vital
principle.

It is no wonder that under the glare of the midsummer sun people
forsake the arid uplands and the vast, heat scorched plains of the
interior and find renewed life and vitality on the borders of the
Atlantic seaboard. The sea in the beginning was the mother of all
life and we do not know what forms of future perfection she is now
nourishing as filmy protoplasm in her depths. She gives us cool
fogs to the reopening of our shrivelled pores and just by walking
along shore we are touched by this vivific principle which gives
such riotous life to all things. There is a saying among Eastern
Massachusetts farmer folk that if you will bathe three times in
the salt water during the summer you will not feel the cold of the
coming winter. Thus is the old myth revived and the modern
Achilles may find invulnerability beneath the Styx, nor need his
heel be left above the tide for his undoing. And the sea has more
than that to give us, more than physical well-being and
invulnerability to the arrows of the winter winds. Out of the
green depths come still the mysterious and the unknown and up over
the blue rim sail day by day argosies laden with romance. Thus it
has always been no