The Joy of Life by Émile Zola

Two days later a very low tide laid the rocks quite bare. Lazare, brimming over with the wild enthusiasm which always filled him at the outset of any of his new schemes, was impatient to be off to the sea-weed. So away he hurried, with bare legs and just a canvas jacket over his bathing-costume. Pauline went with him to share in his investigations. She, too, wore a bathing-costume and the heavy shoes which she used when bound on shrimping expeditions. When they had got about half a mile from the cliffs, and had reached the centre of the spreading tract of sea-weed, still streaming with the water of the ebbing tide, the young man's enthusiasm burst forth as if he were only now discovering that immense crop of marine plants over which he and Pauline had rambled a hundred times before.

'Look! look! ' he cried; 'what money we shall make out of it all; and nobody has ever thought of making any use of it before!'