ur fuel shall warm us twice, as the country
people say,--once in the getting, and again in the burning. Yet no work
seems to have more of the flavor of play in it than that of collecting
drift-wood on some convenient beach, or than this boat-service of ours,
Annie, when we go wandering from island to island in the harbor, and
glide over sea-weedgroves and the habitations of crabs,--or to the
flowery and ruined bastions of Rose Island,--or to those caves at
Coaster's Harbor where we played Victor Hugo, and were eaten up in
fancy by a cuttle-fish. Then we voyaged, you remember, to that further
cave in, the solid rock, just above low-water-mark, a cell
unapproachable by land, and high enough for you to stand erect. There
you wished to play Constance in Marmion, and to be walled up alive, if
convenient; but as it proved impracticable on that day, you helped me
to secure some bits of drift-wood instead. Longer voyages brought waifs
from remoter islands,--whose very names tell, perchance, the changing
story of mariners long since wrecked,--isles baptized Patience and
Prudence, Hope and Despair. And other relics bear witness of more
distant beaches, and of those wrecks which still lie, sentinels of
ruin, along Brenton's Point and Castle Hill.

To collect drift-wood is like botanizing, and one soon learns to
recognize the prevailing species, and to look with pleased eagerness
for new. It is a tragic botany indeed, where, as in enchanted gardens,
every specimen has a voice, and, as you take each from the ground, you
expect from it a cry like the mandrake's. And from what a garden it
comes! As one walks round Brenton's Point after an autumnal storm, it
seems as if the passionate heaving of the waves had brought wholly new
tints to the surface, hues unseen even in dreams before, greens and
purples impossible in serener days. These match the prevailing green
and purple of the slate-cliffs; and Nature in truth carries such fine
fitnesses yet further. For, as we tread the delicate seaside turf,
which makes the farthest point seem merely the land's last bequest of
emerald to the ocean, we suddenly come upon curved lines of lustrous
purple amid the grass, rows on rows of bright muscle-shells, regularly
traced as if a child had played there,--the graceful high-water-mark of
the terrible storm.

It is the crowning fascination of the sea, the consummation of such
might in such infantine delicacy. You may notice it again in the
summer, w