CHAPTER VI.

MY TREASURE GROUNDS

Are you tired?  No?  Well, that is no great wonder.  It is ever so much easier to glide through the water on the broad back of a great fish than to ride horseback, or in a car.

My sails or fins flap quietly to and fro, the water parts readily to make us a path, no rough winds blow away your hat, there is no danger way down here that a boat will bang against us, and roll you off into a cavern or a cave.

Now I am taking you into deeper water, which still is not so very deep, but I want to show you some other strange things in the world I live in.

Here we go sailing in and out of rocks, but do not be alarmed, I know them all.  Perhaps you wonder what it is that we keep pressing against, something soft and smooth that sends extra sprays of water over us.  What can it be?

Well, now, put on your thinking-cap.  What does your mother wash the baby with?  What does Michael wash the carriage with?  And what is that object in the wire holder in the bath-tub?

“Ah, a sponge!” you exclaim.  Yes, and here is where they grow.  “What, sponges grow?” you ask.  Certainly.  And just as with the coral, it took Folks a long time to find out whether sponges were plants, shrubs, or insects.

Now it is decided that the sponge is an animal growth.  And the same as with coral, the tiny creature that it starts from dies, and out from the skeleton, or frame, branches the sponge that sometimes grows very large, and sometimes is of a kind that remains small.  One may be as big as a mop, others no larger than an egg.

Down in the blue Mediterranean Sea are found the best sponges that grow.  They are called “horny sponges,” and grow in great masses, fine, yet tough and durable.  A sponge from the Mediterranean, called the “Turkey sponge,” will cost three times as much as a coarser, more brittle one from other waters.  They are porous, or full of little holes and hollows.

We fishes like to bang against the sponges and feel the sudden spray dash over us.  Water we have all around and about us, but a shower-bath is not as common a thing.

When you buy a sponge, it is round, flat, or cone-shaped.  Now see what they look like under water.  Here is a little tree, you say.  Oh, no, it is only a mass of sponges piled together and branching out as they grow.

Here are fans, arches, tiny caves, and many different shapes forming a sponge-garden.  Queer, isn’t it?  Oh, lots of things are queer until you learn about them.

Would you like to see how I wash myself?  Don’t laugh so loud, you might scare the fishes.  I know very well that it seems to you as if I was washing or bathing all the time, but there!  Some kind of a water-bug has plumped right down onto my head, and left a lot of sticky sand on it, that the water does not wash away.

Now don’t be alarmed.  I won’t let you be swept from my back.  I am only going to wash my head.  See me swim directly under this mass of sponge, swaying out from a rock.  There will be no bits of sand clinging to me after I have been sponged a few moments.