le face under water, and did not hear, till Elsley had
repeated the question.

"Only a rare zoophyte," said he at last, lifting his dripping visage,
and gasping for breath; and then he dived again.

"Inexplicable pedantry of science!" thought Elsley to himself, while
Tom worked on steadfastly, and at last rose, and, taking out a phial
from his basket, was about to deposit in it something invisible.

"Stay a moment; you really have roused my curiosity by your
earnestness. May I see what it is for which you have taken so much
trouble?"

Tom held out on his finger a piece of slimy crust the size of a
halfpenny. Elsley could only shrug his shoulders.

"Nothing to you, sir, I doubt not; but worth a guinea to me, even if
it be only to mount bits of it as microscopic objects."

"So you mingle business with science?" said Elsley, rather in a
contemptuous tone.

"Why not? I must live, and my father too; and it is as honest a way of
making money as any other: I poach in no man's manor for my game."

"But what is your game! What possible attraction in that bit of dirt
can make men spend their money on it?"

"You shall see," said Tom, dropping it into the phial of salt water,
and offering it to Elsley, with his pocket magnifier.

"Judge for yourself."

Elsley did so, and beheld a new wonder--a living plant of crystal,
studded with crystal bells, from each of which waved a crown of
delicate arms. It was the first time that Elsley had ever seen one
of those exquisite zoophytes which stud every rock and every tuft of
weed.

"This is most beautiful," said he at length. "Humph! why should not
Mr. Vavasour write a poem about it?"

"Why not indeed?" thought Elsley.

"It's no business of mine, no man's less: but I often wonder why you
poets don't take to the microscope, and tell us a little more about
the wonderful things which are here already, and not about those which
are not, and which, perhaps, never will be."

"Well," said Elsley, after another look: "but, after all, these things
have no human interest in them."

"I don't know that; they have to me, for instance. These are the
things which I would write about if I had any turn for verse, not
about human nature, of which I know, I'm afraid, a little too much
already. I always like to read old 'Darwin's Loves of the Plants;'
bosh as it is in a scientific point of view, it amuses one's fancy
without making one lose one's temper, as one must when one begins to
analy