ep with weariness and rest, listening to
the low plash and retreat of the tiny waves, which seemed ever enticing
the land to leave off being land, and become sea. And as she lay, her
eyes were fixed upon the foot of a great rainbow standing far away
against the sky on the other side of the sea. At length she fell fast
asleep.

When she awoke, she saw an old man with long white hair down to his
shoulders, leaning upon a stick covered with green buds, and so bending
over her.

"What do you want here, beautiful woman?" he said.

"Am I beautiful? I am so glad!" said Tangle, rising. "My grandmother is
beautiful."

"Yes. But what do you want?" he repeated, kindly.

"I think I want you. Are not you the Old Man of the Sea?"

"I am."

"Then Grandmother says, have you any more fishes ready for her?"

"We will go and see, my dear," answered the old man, speaking yet more
kindly than before. "And I can do something for you, can I not?"

"Yes--show me the way up to the country from which the shadows fall,"
said Tangle.

For there she hoped to find Mossy again.

"Ah! indeed, that would be worth doing," said the old man. "But I
cannot, for I do not know the way myself. But I will send you to the
Old Man of the Earth. Perhaps he can tell you. He is much older than I
am."

Leaning on his staff, he conducted her along the shore to a steep rock,
that looked like a petrified ship turned upside down. The door of it
was the rudder of a great vessel, ages ago at the bottom of the sea.
Immediately within the door was a stair in the rock, down which the old
man went, and Tangle followed. At the bottom the old man had his house,
and there he lived.

As soon as she entered it, Tangle heard a strange noise, unlike
anything she had ever heard before. She soon found that it was the
fishes talking. She tried to understand what they said; but their
speech was so old-fashioned, and rude, and undefined, that she could
not make much of it.

"I will go and see about those fishes for my daughter," said the Old
Man of the Sea.

And moving a slide in the wall of his house, he first looked out, and
then tapped upon a thick piece of crystal that filled the round
opening. Tangle came up behind him, and peeping through the window into
the heart of the great deep green ocean, saw the most curious
creatures, some very ugly, all very odd, and with especially queer
mouths, swimming about everywhere, above and below, but all coming
towards the w