“Now,” said the baby, “come and help me, or I shall not have finished before my brothers and sisters come, and it is time to go home.”

“What shall I help you at?”

“At this poor, dear little rock; a great clumsy boulder came rolling by in the last storm, and knocked all its head off, and rubbed off all its flowers.  And now I must plant it again with seaweeds, and coraline, and anemones, and I will make it the prettiest little rock-garden on all the shore.”

So they worked away at the rock, and planted it, and smoothed the sand down round it, and capital fun they had till the tide began to turn.  And then Tom heard all the other babies coming, laughing and singing and shouting and romping; and the noise they made was just like the noise of the ripple.  So he knew that he had been hearing and seeing the water babies all along; only he did not know them, because his eyes and ears were not opened.

And in they came, dozens and dozens of them, some bigger than Tom and some smaller, all in the neatest little white bathing dresses; and when they found that he was a new baby, they hugged and kissed him, and then put him in the middle and danced around him on the sand, and there was no one ever so happy as poor little Tom.

“Now then,” they cried all at once, “we must come away home, we must come away home, or the tide will leave us dry.  We have mended all the broken seaweed, and put all the rock-pools in order, and planted all the shells again in the sand, and nobody will see where the ugly storm swept last week.”

And this is the reason why the rock-pools are always so neat and clean; because the water babies come inshore after every storm to sweep them out, and comb them down, and put them all to rights again.

Only where men are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea instead of putting the stuff upon the fields like thrifty, reasonable souls; or throw herrings’ heads and dead dog-fish, or any other refuse, into the water; or in any way make a mess upon the clean shore—­there the water babies will not come, sometimes not for hundreds of years (for they cannot abide anything smelly or foul), but leave the sea anemones and the crabs to clear away everything till the good, tidy sea has covered up all the dirt in soft mud and clean sand, where the water babies can plant live cockles and whelks and razor shells and sea cucumbers and golden combs, and make a pretty live garden again, after man’s dirt is cleared away.  And that, I suppose, is the reason why there are no water babies at any watering place which I have ever seen.