That vast and estimable dame we know as the ocean has a determined antipathy for all untidiness. So varied and prolific is the life she nurtures that death and dissolution are forever in her tides. Yonder a sea-bird stricken far offshore, and there a great fish, monstrous and unreal, and everywhere the rubbish of her gardens, the streaming kelp, the lacy weed that is so like the flounce of a Victorian gown. Her shell-fish perish in their seasons, and there are constantly recurrent fatalities among the crustaceans.

The vari-colored jellyfishes come to an end of days, and rent and torn by the tides are carried shoreward, while continually there is borne to the beach a great burden of minute marine forms, the algae, and indeed all plankton-that thin but nourishing soup-stock of the sea. In a single week of summer the beaches receive so much of outworn life that only for the wise provisions of Nature they would reek of death. But the sea, through her attendants, is intolerant of foulness and decay, and works interminably to keep her house in order.

It suffices to name but three of her principal servants, whose duty it is to police the beach, and to free the air from pollution, so that the sands are commonly as clean as a swept hearth, and the breeze untainted. These three are the hovering gulls, with an eye keen for any flotsam, the anchorite sea-anemones, and those ubiquitous and agile crustaceans that are called sand-fleas or sandhoppers. Of these three widely varying forms of life, these servants of the sea, possibly the most important service are that rendered by the omnivorous sand-hopper, whose nimble antics appear so purposeless and frantic. For the anemone must bide where it is stationed, patient as time, and the gull is rather a finical fellow, exercising a somewhat narrow choice of foods, but the sand-hopper is legion and everywhere, and its crustacean appetite asks no question of the fare that is spread. It gleans where the gull has feasted, it penetrates the mollusks that defy the bird, and its salad is kelp and weed.

To the sea-anemone in its pool, whence current and tide cast both dead and living food, all that comes within reach of its tentacles is destined for its capacious stomach. In rose or emerald it blossoms as a flower, but its purpose is to satisfy hunger, and its loveliness screens avidity! Thus it combs the fringes of ocean for aught the tide may bring, and does important service toward the cleanliness of the sea. To the questing gull all meat is food, and since much of the sea's wastage is beyond the capacity of those other creatures that feed at the brink of the sea, and too huge of bulk for immediate demolition by the minor crustaceans, it follows that a deal of tidying is left to the midget sand-hopper.