A Jolly Fellowship by Frank R. Stockton — Read

There was one place that I wished, particularly, to visit before I left, and that was what the people in Nassau called the Coral-reef. There were lots of coral-reefs all about the islands, but this one was easily visited, and for this reason, I suppose, was chosen as a representative of its class. I had been there before, and had seen all the wonders of the reef through a water-glass, -- which is a wooden box, with a pane of glass at one end and open at the other. You hold the glass end of this box just under the water, and put your face to the open end, and then you can see down under the water, exactly as if you were looking through the air. And on this coral-reef, where the water was not more than twelve or fourteen feet deep, there were lots of beautiful things to see. It was like a submarine garden.

There was coral in every form and shape, and of different colors; there were sea-feathers, which stood up like waving purple trees, most of them a foot or two high, but some a good deal higher; there were sea-fans, purple and yellow, that spread themselves up from the curious bits of coral-rock on the bottom, and there were ever so many other things that grew like bushes and vines, and of all sorts of colors. Among all these you could see the fishes swimming about, as if they were in a great aquarium. Some of these fishes were very large, with handsome black bands across their backs, but the prettiest were some little fellows, no bigger than sardines, that swam in among the branches of the sea-feathers and fans. They were colored bright blue, and yellow and red; some of them with two or three colors apiece. Rectus called them "humming-fishes. " They did remind me of humming-birds, although they didn't hum.