retiring tide, a mass of life such as you will seldom see again.
It is somewhat ugly, perhaps, at first sight; for ankle-deep are
spread, for some ten yards long by five broad, huge dirty bivalve
shells, as large as the hand, each with its loathly grey and black
siphons hanging out, a confused mass of slimy death. Let us walk
on to some cleaner heap, and leave these, the great Lutraria
Elliptica, which have been lying buried by thousands in the sandy
mud, each with the point of its long siphon above the surface,
sucking in and driving out again the salt water on which it feeds,
till last night's ground-swell shifted the sea-bottom, and drove
them up hither to perish helpless, but not useless, on the beach.

See, close by is another shell bed, quite as large, but comely
enough to please any eye. What a variety of forms and colours are
there, amid the purple and olive wreaths of wrack, and bladder-
weed, and tangle (ore-weed, as they call it in the south), and the
delicate green ribbons of the Zostera (the only English flowering
plant which grows beneath the sea). What are they all? What are
the long white razors? What are the delicate green-grey scimitars?
What are the tapering brown spires? What the tufts of delicate
yellow plants like squirrels' tails, and lobsters' horns, and
tamarisks, and fir-trees, and all other finely cut animal and
vegetable forms? What are the groups of grey bladders, with
something like a little bud at the tip? What are the hundreds of
little pink-striped pears? What those tiny babies' heads, covered
with grey prickles instead of hair? The great red star-fish, which
Ulster children call "the bad man's hands;" and the great whelks,
which the youth of Musselburgh know as roaring buckies, these we
have seen before; but what, oh what, are the red capsicums? -