Do you
think that was too bad, and quite discouraging to the workers. It does
seem so; but you will see how the good God, who is their loving Father
just the same as he is ours, had a grand purpose in letting the waves
break down their houses, just as he always does in all the
disappointments he sends to us. Wait till you finish the story, and tell
me if you don't think so.
And now let us see what the star-fish thought of the little town and its
inhabitants. "Ah, these are your houses!" he said. "Why don't you come
out of them, and travel about to see the world?"--"These are not our
houses, but ourselves," answered the polyps; "we can't come out, and we
don't want to. We are here to build, and building is all we care to do;
as for seeing the world, that is all very well for those who have eyes,
but we have none."
Then the star-fish turned away in contempt from such creatures,--"people
of neither taste nor ability, no eyes, no feet, no water-strainers; poor
little useless things, what good are they in the world, with their
stupid, blind building of which they think so much?" And he worked
himself off into a branch water-train that was setting that way, and,
without so much as bidding the polyps good-by, turned his back upon
Coraltown, and presently found a fellow-passenger fine enough to absorb
all his attention,--a passenger, I say, but we shall find it rather a
group of passengers in their own pretty boat; some curled in spiral
coils, some trailing like little swimmers behind, some snugly ensconced
inside, but all of such brilliant colors and gay bearing that even the
star-fish felt his inferiority; and, wishing to make friends with so
fine a neighbor, he whirled a tempting morsel of food towards one of the
swimming party, and politely offered it to him.
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