Now, this is not a coral grove, it is a garden of flowers, and when you exclaim again, “Oh, but I had no idea of this!” I should have to reply, “Of course you hadn’t; no more had I of the strange and beautiful things on the land, until I had to live there a little while.”

Folks call these flowers, such as they have seen of them, weeds, seaweeds.  And I suppose they have to come under that name, as they are not planted from seeds, but are a wild growth.  Ah, but some great Planter or Gardener surely put all these wonderful shapes and splendid tints in the soft earth of a sea-garden.  And it is all so blithe and gay!

Here are nearly all the shapes in bushes and almost trees that you have in your garden on land.  And as to flowers, there are leaves, spires, cups, bells, tassels, very much such as you see in your garden at home.

See these beautiful crimson leaves, as large as the top of a small table, and cut in such fine, even scallops around the edges, and here is one with a great pad of yellow right on the crimson.  My!  My! is it not colored richly?

Here are leaves shooting out like rafts, thick, like the leaves of a rubber-tree, but larger and of a deep red.  You might take a sail on one of them.  And here is a bush, shooting upright from its muddy bed, all covered with pink sprays, on which are pink blossoms.  Doesn’t it make you think of a syringa bush?  Only these flowers are pink.

Next comes this plant with a large olive green stem covered thickly with branches, bearing flowers resembling pink roses.  Were this plant taken to the church some Sunday morning and placed on the pulpit-stand, you may believe that after the service Folks would go crowding about the altar, eager to find out its name and whence it came.

What a clucking of surprise there would be when it was told that not from any hothouse whatever, but from the depths of the ocean came the full, lovely sea-roses.

Are these sprays of pink coral?  No, they are sea-rods and branches.  If you pinch the thick stems, water will ooze out, for they are partly hollow, like the pond-lily stem.

I do not wonder you look with questioning surprise at that next plant.  It is like a mass of purple bushes, a very sweet growth rather hard to describe.  All through the delicate branches are what look like small dark berries, seen through a mist of pinkish, hairy spires.

Don’t start.  These merry fishes darting through the next clump of bushes have only come to smell of the carnation pinks the bushes bear.  Are they not strangely like your garden carnations?

See the fishes nip at those singular pink flowers with a thick fringe hanging from the edges.  It is a shame to spoil them, but some fishes always seem to think that graceful fringe droops down on purpose for them to peck at.

Now if the baby were only here, you could seat him on these broad, flat leaves, with delicate spires all along the edges, and all of so deep a crimson they surely would attract any child.