opic seas. After all, I am not
leading you as far away as you fancy by several thousand miles, as
you will see, I trust, ere I have done.

Let me take you to some island: what shall it be like? Shall it be
a high island, with cliff piled on cliff, and peak on peak, all rich
with mighty forests, like a furred mantle of green velvet, mounting
up and up till it is lost among white clouds above? Or shall it be a
mere low reef, which you do not see till you are close upon it; on
which nothing rises above the water, but here and there a knot of
cocoa-nut palms or a block of stone, or a few bushes, swarming with
innumerable sea-fowl and their eggs? Let it be which you will: both
are strange enough; both beautiful; both will tell us a story.

The ship will have to lie-to, and anchor if she can; it may be a
mile, it may be only a few yards, from the land. For between it and
the land will be a line of breakers, raging in before the warm trade-
wind. And this, you will be told, marks the edge of the coral reef.

You will have to go ashore in a boat, over a sea which looks
unfathomable, and which may be a mile or more in depth, and search
for an opening in the reef, through which the boat can pass without
being knocked to pieces.

You find one: and in a moment, what a change! The deep has suddenly
become shallow; the blue white, from the gleam of the white coral at
the bottom. But the coral is not all white, only indeed a little of
it; for as you look down through the clear water, you find that the
coral is starred with innumerable live flowers, blue, crimson, grey,
every conceivable hue; and that these are the coral polypes, each
with its ring of arms thrust out of its cell, who are building up
their common habitations of lime. If you want to understand, by a
rough but correct description, what a coral polype is: all who have
been to the sea-side know, or at least have heard of, sea-anemones.
Now coral polypes are sea-anemones, which make each a shell of lime,
growing with its growth. As for their shapes, the variety of them,
the beauty of them, no tongue can describe them. If you want to see
them, go to the Coral Rooms of the British or Liverpool Museums, and
judge for yourselves. Only remember that you must re-clothe each of
those exquisite forms with a coating of live jelly of some delicate
hue, and put back into every one of the thousand cells its living
flower; and into the