She gave a
cry of pleasure: "What are they, Doctor? What do you call them?"
"Sea anemones, in English, I believe," said the Doctor, "actinias,
serpulas, and sabellas. You may see something like that on the European
coasts, on a small scale, but there is nothing I ever have seen like
that great crimson fellow with cream-coloured tentacles. I do not know
his name. I suspect he has never been described. The common European
anemone they call 'crassicornis' is something like him, but not half as
fine."
"Is there any means of gathering and keeping them, Doctor?" asked Sam.
"We have no flowers in the garden like them."
"No possible means," said the Doctor. "They are but lumps of jelly. Let
us come away and get round the headland before the tide comes in."
They wandered on from cove to cove, under the dark cliffs, till
rounding a little headland the Doctor called out,--
"Here is something in your Cornish style, Halbert."
A thin wall of granite, like a vast buttress, ran into the sea, pierced
by a great arch, some sixty feet high. Aloft all sharp grey stone:
below, wherever the salt water had reached, a mass of dark clinging
weed: while beyond, as though set in a dark frame, was a soft glimpse
of blue sky and snow-white seabirds.
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