No.  I say it again.  If you wish to learn, I will only teach you on condition that you do not laugh at, or despise, those good and honest and able people who do not know or care about these things, because they have other things to think of:  like old John out there ploughing.  He would not believe you—­he would hardly believe me—­if we told him that this stone had been once a swarm of living things, of exquisite shapes and glorious colours.  And yet he can plough and sow, and reap and mow, and fell and strip, and hedge and ditch, and give his neighbours sound advice, and take the measure of a man’s worth from ten minutes’ talk, and say his prayers, and keep his temper, and pay his debts,—­which last three things are more than a good many folks can do who fancy themselves a whole world wiser than John in the smock-frock.

Oh, but I want to hear about the exquisite shapes and glorious colours.

Of course you do, little man.  A few fine epithets take your fancy far more than a little common sense and common humility; but in that you are no worse than some of your elders.  So now for the exquisite shapes and glorious colours.  I have never seen them; though I trust to see them ere I die.  So what they are like I can only tell from what I have learnt from Mr. Darwin, and Mr. Wallace, and Mr. Jukes, and Mr. Gosse, and last, but not least, from one whose soul was as beautiful as his face, Lucas Barrett,—­too soon lost to science,—­who was drowned in exploring such a coral-reef as this stone was once.

Then there are such things alive now?

Yes, and no.  The descendants of most of them live on, altered by time, which alters all things; and from the beauty of the children we can guess at the beauty of their ancestors; just as from the coral-reefs which exist now we can guess how the coral-reefs of old were made.  And that this stone was once part of a coral-reef the corals in it prove at first sight.

And what is a coral-reef like?

You have seen the room in the British Museum full of corals, madrepores, brain-stones, corallines, and sea-ferns?

Oh yes.

Then fancy all those alive.  Not as they are now, white stone:  but covered in jelly; and out of every pore a little polype, like a flower, peeping out.  Fancy them of every gaudy colour you choose.  No bed of flowers, they say, can be more brilliant than the corals, as you look down on them through the clear sea.  Fancy, again, growing among them and crawling over them, strange sea-anemones, shells, star-fish, sea-slugs, and sea-cucumbers with feathery gills, crabs, and shrimps, and hundreds of other animals, all as strange in shape, and as brilliant in colour.  You may let your fancy run wild.  Nothing so odd, nothing so gay, even entered your dreams, or a poet’s, as you may find alive at the bottom of the sea, in the live flower-gardens of the sea-fairies.

There will be shoals of fish, too, playing in and out, as strange and gaudy as the rest,—­parrot-fish who browse on the live coral with their beak-like teeth, as cattle browse on grass; and at the bottom, it may be, larger and uglier fish, who eat the crabs and shell-fish, shells and all, grinding them up as a dog grinds a bone, and so turning shells and corals into fine soft mud, such as this stone is partly made of.