This sea-grass, or Zostera, the only flowering plant to
be found in the sea, is very useful to the poor people who live near the
coast. They gather it when the tide is low, and dry it in the sun, and it
serves them for nice soft beds; though I should think they must always keep
a briny, fishy smell about them.
[Illustration: "O'ER BANKS OF BRIGHT SEAWEED, THE EBB-TIDE LEAVES DRY."]
The Irish fisher-folk also gather the common brown seaweed with pods, which
are really air-bladders, and serve to keep it afloat. I have many a time
watched the women and children wading among the pools, cutting it from the
rocks with sickles, and putting it into baskets, which they carry home
on their backs; for this precious harvest of the sea is what they depend
upon to make their potatoes grow well and yield a plentiful crop. There is
another kind of seaweed, of a pretty purple colour, which they eat, and
call it by an Irish name which means "leaf of the water."
But it is far away in the watery valleys of the great Pacific, where the
sea is very calm, that the ocean forests grow. I have read that there giant
leaves of the sea grow upon stems longer than those of our tallest trees,
and spread abroad like waving palms. Though you are not likely ever to
see such seaweeds as these, you will find, wherever you may be, though
much more abundantly on some shores than others, some of those beautiful
"weeds"--green, red, or brown--which have their use as well as their
beauty; for they help to purify the water, just as plants do the air.
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