and without
prejudice to the stillness. A man may lie in the profoundest trance and
still be breathing, and the very pulsations of the life of nature, in
these calm hours, are to be read in these changing tints and shadows
and ripples, and in the mirage-bewildered outlines of the islands in
the bay. It is this incessant shifting of relations, this perpetual
substitution of fantastic for real values, this inability to trust your
own eye or ear unless the mind makes its own corrections,--that gives
such an inexhaustible attraction to life beside the ocean. The
sea-change comes to you without your waiting to be drowned. You must
recognize the working of your own imagination and allow for it. When,
for instance, the sea-fog settles down around us at nightfall, it
sometimes grows denser and denser till it apparently becomes more solid
than the pavements of the town, or than the great globe itself; and
when the fog-whistles go wailing on through all the darkened hours,
they seem to be signalling not so much for a lost ship as for a lost
island.

How unlike are those weird and gloomy nights to this sunny noon, when I
rest my oars in this sheltered bay, where a small lagoon makes in
behind Coaster's Harbor Island, and the very last breath and murmur of
the ocean are left outside! The coming tide steals to the shore in
waves so light they are a mere shade upon the surface till they break,
and then die speechless for one that has a voice. And even those rare
voices are the very most confidential and silvery whispers in which
Nature ever spoke to man; the faintest summer insect seems resolute and
assured beside them; and yet it needs but an indefinite multiplication
of these sounds to make up the thunder of the surf. It is so still that
I can let the wherry drift idly along the shore, and can watch the life
beneath the water. The small fry cluster and evade between me and the
brink; the half-translucent shrimp glides gracefully undisturbed, or
glances away like a flash if you but touch the surface; the crabs
waddle or burrow, the smaller species mimicking unconsciously the hue
of the soft green sea-weed, and the larger looking like motionless
stones, covered with barnacles and decked with fringing weeds. I am
acquainted with no better Darwinian than the crab; and however clumsy
he may be when taken from his own element, he has a free and floating
motion which is almost graceful in his own yielding and buoyant home.
It is so with