hen our bay is thronged for miles on miles with inch-long
jelly-fishes,--lovely creatures, in shape like disembodied
gooseberries, and shot through and through in the sunlight with all
manner of blue and golden glistenings, and bearing tiny rows of
fringing oars that tremble like a baby's eyelids. There is less of
gross substance in them than in any other created thing,--mere water
and outline, destined to perish at a touch, but seemingly never
touching, for they float secure, finding no conceivable cradle so soft
as this awful sea. They are like melodies amid Beethoven's Symphonies,
or like the songs that wander through Shakespeare, and that seem things
too fragile to risk near Cleopatra's passion and Hamlet's woe. Thus
tender is the touch of ocean; and look, how around this piece of oaken
timber, twisted and torn and furrowed,--its iron bolts snapped across
as if bitten,--there is yet twined a gay garland of ribbon-weed,
bearing on its trailing stem a cluster of bright shells, like a
mermaid's chatelaine.

Thus adorned, we place it on the blaze. As night gathers without, the
gale rises. It is a season of uneasy winds, and of strange, rainless
storms, which perplex the fishermen, and indicate rough weather out at
sea. As the house trembles and the windows rattle, we turn towards the
fire with a feeling of safety. Representing the fiercest of all
dangers, it yet expresses security and comfort.

Should a gale tear the roof from over our heads and show the black sky
alone above us, we should not feel utterly homeless while this fire
burned,--at least I can recall such a feeling of protection when once
left suddenly roofless by night in one of the wild gorges of Mount
Katahdin. There is a positive demonstrative force in an open fire,
which makes it your fit ally in a storm. Settled and obdurate cold may
well be encountered by the quiet heat of an invisible furnace. But this
howling wind might depress one's spirits, were it not met by a force as
palpable,--the warm blast within answering to the cold blast without.
The wide chimney then becomes the scene of contest: wind meets wind,
sparks encounter rain-drops, they fight in the air like the visioned
soldiers of Attila; sometimes a daring drop penetrates, and dies,
hissing, on the hearth; and sometimes a troop of sparks may make a
sortie from the chimney-top. I know not how else we can meet the
elements by a defiance so magnificent as that from this open hearth;
and in bur