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.
But what happens to all the delicate little corals if a storm comes on?
What, indeed?
Madam How has made them so well and wisely, that, like brave and good men, the more trouble they suffer the stronger they are.
Day and night, week after week, the trade-wind blows upon them, hurling the waves against them in furious surf, knocking off great lumps of coral, grinding them to powder, throwing them over the reef into the shallow water inside.

But the heavier the surf beats upon them, the stronger the polypes outside grow, repairing their broken houses, and building up fresh coral on the dead coral below, because it is in the fresh sea-water that beats upon the surf that they find most lime with which to build.

And as they build they form a barrier against the surf, inside of which, in water still as glass, the weaker and more delicate things can grow in safety, just as these very Encrinites may have grown, rooted in the lime-mud, and waving their slender arms at the bottom of the clear lagoon.

Such mighty builders are these little coral polypes, that all the works of men are small compared with theirs.