THE HOME BY THE OCEAN.
Would you like to know about my home by the ocean? We live in a very pleasant place. We never get tired of playing upon the beach and watching the ships sail by.
When a ship first comes in sight we can see only the tops of the sails. These grow larger and larger and at last the whole of the boat comes in sight. If we climb to the top of a hill we can see the boat much sooner. Our teacher says that we see the tops of the boats first because the earth is round.
Some of the ships come from the other side of the world, for the fishermen once took us out to one and the captain let us see the sugar and oranges and bananas which he had brought thousands of miles.
The water in the ocean behaves very strangely. It is always moving up or down. Twice every day it rises and sometimes we are afraid that it will flow over the land where our home is. But it always stops and then goes down again.
This rising and falling of the water the fisher men call the tide. When the tide is out it is great fun to climb over the rocks and see what the water has left. There are little ponds where we find strange-looking fish, bright-colored sea-weeds, shells, star-fish, and many other things.
In some places there are great stretches of mud flats when the tide is out. There we find different kinds of clams buried in the mud.
When the wind blows hard there are great waves. They break with such force upon the shore that even the hard rocks are worn away. They are slowly tearing down the bank in front of our home. Once a ship was blown ashore and the waves soon broke it to pieces.
There are many pretty pebbles upon the beach. They have been worn smooth by the waves which are always throwing them about.
We wonder if there are hills and valleys beneath the ocean as there are on the land. The fishermen say that in most places the bottom of the ocean is smooth. There are no brooks and rivers in the ocean to dig out valleys as there are on the land.
We have learned that the shore of the ocean has not always been where it is now. At the foot of the hill back of our home there is a layer of shells like those in the ocean, and a whole field of smooth pebbles.
We love to study geography because we have discovered so many things along the ocean that we have read about.