the little castles, breaking themselves into snowy spray, and crumbling away at the same time the tiny walls that had been the polyps’ work of years.  Do you think that was too bad, and quite discouraging to the workers.  It does seem so; but you will see how the good God, who is their loving Father just the same as he is ours, had a grand purpose in letting the waves break down their houses, just as he always does in all the disappointments he sends to us.  Wait till you finish the story, and tell me if you don’t think so.

And now let us see what the star-fish thought of the little town and its inhabitants.  “Ah, these are your houses!” he said.  “Why don’t you come out of them, and travel about to see the world?”—­“These are not our houses, but ourselves,” answered the polyps; “we can’t come out, and we don’t want to.  We are here to build, and building is all we care to do; as for seeing the world, that is all very well for those who have eyes, but we have none.”

Then the star-fish turned away in contempt from such creatures,—­“people of neither taste nor ability, no eyes, no feet, no water-strainers; poor little useless things, what good are they in the world, with their stupid, blind building of which they think so much?” And he worked himself off into a branch water-train that was setting that way, and, without so much as bidding the polyps good-by, turned his back upon Coraltown, and presently found a fellow-passenger fine enough to absorb all his attention,—­a passenger, I say, but we shall find it rather a group of passengers in their own pretty boat; some curled in spiral coils, some trailing like little swimmers behind, some snugly ensconced inside, but all of such brilliant colors and gay bearing that even the star-fish felt his inferiority; and, wishing to make friends with so fine a neighbor, he whirled a tempting morsel of food towards one of the swimming party, and politely offered it to him.  “No, I thank you,” replied the swimmer, “I don’t eat; my sister does the eating, I only swim.”  Turning to another of the gay company with the same offer, he was answered, “Thank you, the eaters are at the other side; I only lay eggs.”  “What strange people!” thought the star-fish; but, with all his learning, he didn’t know every thing, and had never heard how people sometimes live in communities, and divide the work as suits their fancy.

While we leave him wondering, let us go back to Coraltown.  The crumbling bits, beaten off by the waves, floated about, filling all the chinks of the wall, while the rough edges at the top caught long ribbons of seaweed, and sometimes drifting wood from wrecked vessels, and then the sea washed up sand in great heaps against the walls, building buttresses for them.  Do you know what buttresses are?  If you don’t, I will leave you to find out.  And the polyps, who do not know how to live in the light and air, had all died; or those who were wanderers had emigrated to some new place.  Poor little things, their useless lives had ended, and what good had they done in the world?