A couple of days had passed, and I was crawling up the paved stairs
inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated
‘Clovelly-street,’ a landing-net full of shells in one hand, and a couple
of mackerel lines in the other; behind me a sheer descent, roof below
roof; at an angle of 45°, to the pier and bay, 200 feet below, and in
front, another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak, and ash,
and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the
low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some
gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of
sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs, and
bright green railings, packed one above another upon the ledges of the
cliff; and on the tall tree-fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little
scraps of court-yard, calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas
and jessamines, and, alas! out of the herring-heads and tails also, as
they lay in the rivulet; and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous
butterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, which
fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland,
and seemed to form the connecting link between that swarming hive of
human industry and the deep wild woods in which it was embosomed. So up
I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my own catching,—excellent fish,
despised by deluded Cockneys, who fancy that because its head is large
and prickly, therefore its flesh is not as firm, and sweet, and white, as
that of any cod who ever gobbled shell-fish,—when down the stair front of
me, greasy as ice from the daily shower, came slipping and staggering, my
friend Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio.
‘Where have you been wandering to-day?’ I asked. ‘Have you yet been as
far as the park, which, as I told you, would supply such endless subjects
for your pencil?’
‘Not I. I have been roaming up and down this same “New Road” above us;
and find there materials for a good week’s more work, if I could afford
it. Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that I got as far as
the lodge at the end of it, and then was glad enough to turn back
shuddering at the first glimpse of the flat, dreary moorland beyond,—as
Adam may have turned back into Eden after a peep out of the gates of
Paradise.’
He should have taken courage and gone a half-mile further,—to the
furze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which gives its name to the
place, ‘Clovelly,’—Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as antiquarians
derive it; perhaps, ‘the hidden camp,’ or glen,—perhaps something else.
Who cares? The old Romans were there, at least 10,000 strong: and some
sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough to perch his
summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling
into the sea, tesselated pavement, baths and all. And strange work, no
doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out over the Atlantic
swell,—nights and days fit for Petronius’s own pen, among a seraglio of
dark Celtic beauties. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. An ugly state
of things—as heathen conquests always must have been; yet even in it
there was a use and meaning. But they are past like a dream, those
10,000 stalwart men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian moors
from a station which would be, even in these days, a first-rate military
position. Gone, too, are the old Saxon Franklins who succeeded. Old
Wrengils, or some such name, whoever he was, at last found some one’s
bill too hard for his brain-pan; and there he lies on the hill above, in
his ‘barrow’ of Wrinklebury. And gone, too, the gay Norman squire, who,
as tradition says, kept his fair lady in the old watch-tower, on the
highest point of the White Cliff—‘Gallantry Bower,’ as they call it to
this day—now a mere ring of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted
oaks, shorn by the Atlantic blasts into the shape of two huge cannon,
which form a favourite landmark for the fisherman of the bay. Gone they
all are, Cymry and Roman, Saxon and Norman; and upon the ruins of their
accumulated labour we stand here. Each of them had his use,—planted a
few more trees or cleared a few more, tilled a fresh scrap of down,
organized a scrap more of chaos. Who dare wish the tide of improvement,
which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifter and swifter still
as it goes on, to stop, just because it is not convenient to us just now
to move on? It will not take another nineteen hundred years, be sure, to
make even this lovely nook as superior to what it is now as it is now to
the little knot of fishing huts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling
at the iron tramp of each insolent legionary from the camp above. It
will not take another nineteen hundred years to develope the capabilities
of this place,—to make it the finest fishery in England, next to
Torbay,—the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, along sixty
miles of ruthless coast,—and a commercial centre for a vast tract of
half-tilled land within, which only requires means of conveyance to be as
fertile and valuable as nine-tenths of England. Meanwhile Claude ought
to have seen the deer-park. The panorama from that old ruined ‘bower’ of
cliff and woodland, down and sea, is really unique in its way.
‘So is the whole place, in my eyes,’ said Claude. ‘I have seen nothing
in England to be compared to this little strip of paradise between two
great waste worlds of sea and moor. Lynmouth might be matched among the
mountains of Wales and Ireland. The first three miles of the Rheidol,
from the Devil’s Bridge towards Aberystwith, or the gorge of the Wye,
down the opposite watershed of the same mountains, from Castle Dufferin
down to Rhaiadyr, are equal to it in magnificence of form and colour, and
superior in size. But I question whether anything ever charmed me more
than did the return to the sounds of nature which greeted me to-day, as I
turned back from the dreary, silent moorland turnpike into this new road,
terraced along the cliffs and woods—those who first thought of cutting it
must have had souls in them above the herd—and listened to a glorious
concert in four parts, blending and supporting each other in exquisite
harmony, from the shrill treble of a thousand birds, and the soft
melancholy alto of the moaning woods, downward through the rich tenor hum
of innumerable insects, who hung like sparks of fire beneath the glades
of oak, to the bass of the unseen surge below,
“Whose deep and dreadful organ-pipe,”
far below me, contrasted strangely with the rich soft inland character of
the deep woods, luxuriant ferns, and gaudy flowers. It is that very
contrast which makes the place so unique. One is accustomed to connect
with the notion of the sea bare cliffs, breezy downs, stunted shrubs
struggling for existence: and instead of them behold a forest wall, 500
feet high, of almost semi-tropic luxuriance. At one turn, a deep glen,
with its sea of green woods, filled up at the mouth with the bright azure
sheet of ocean.—Then some long stretch of the road would be banked on one
side with crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, and
London pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of
white bramble blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on
my right, the cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded me so close,
that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen
unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere between green sprays
and grey stems, gleamed that same boundless ocean blue, seeming, from the
height at which I was, to mount into the very sky. It looked but a step
out of the leafy covert into blank infinity. And then, as the road wound
round some point, one’s eye could fall down, down, through the abyss of
perpendicular wood, tree below tree clinging to and clothing the cliff,
or rather no cliff; but perpendicular sheet of deep wood sedge, and broad
crown ferns, spreading their circular fans.—But there is no describing
them, or painting them either.—And then to see how the midday sunbeams
leapt past one down the abyss, throwing out here a grey stem by one point
of burnished silver, there a hazel branch by a single leaf of glowing
golden green, shooting long bright arrows down, through the dim, hot,
hazy atmosphere of the wood, till it rested at last upon the dappled
beach of pink and grey pebbles, and the dappled surge which wandered up
and down among them, and broke up into richer intricacy with its
chequer-work of woodland shadows, the restless net of snowy foam.’
‘You must be fresh from reading Mr. Ruskin’s book, Claude, to be able to
give birth to such a piece of complex magniloquence as that last period
of yours.’
‘Why, I saw all that, and ten thousand things more; and yet do you
complain of me for having tried to put one out of all those thousand
things into words? And what do you mean by sneering at Mr. Ruskin? Are
there not in his books more and finer passages of descriptive
poetry—word-painting—call them what you will, than in any other prose
book in the English language?’
‘Not a doubt of it, my dear Claude; but it will not do for every one to
try Mr. Ruskin’s tools. Neither you nor I possess that almost Roman
severity, that stern precision of conception and expression, which
enables him to revel in the most gorgeous language, without ever letting
it pall upon the reader’s taste by affectation or over-lusciousness. His
style is like the very hills along which you have been travelling, whose
woods enrich, without enervating, the grand simplicity of their forms.’
‘The comparison is just,’ said Claude. ‘Mr. Ruskin’s style, like those
very hills, and like, too, the Norman cathedrals of which he is so fond,
is rather magnified than concealed by the innumerable multiplicity of its
ornamental chasing and colouring.’
‘And is not that,’ I asked, ‘the very highest achievement of artistic
style?’
‘Doubtless. The severe and grand simplicity, of which folks talk so
much, is great indeed; but only the greatest as long as men are still
ignorant of Nature’s art of draping her forms with colour, chiaroscuro,
ornament, not at the expense of the original design, but in order to
perfect it by making it appeal to every faculty instead of those of form
and size alone.’
‘Still you will allow the beauty of a bare rock, a down, a church spire,
a sheet or line of horizontal water,—their necessity to the completion of
a landscape. I recollect well having the value of a stern straight line
in Nature brought home to me, when, during a long ride in the New Forest,
after my eye had become quite dulled and wearied with the monotonous
softness of rolling lawns, feathery heath, and rounded oak and beech
woods, I suddenly caught sight of the sharp peaked roof of Rhinefield
Lodge, and its row of tall stiff poplar-spires, cutting the endless sea
of curves. The relief to my eye was delicious. I really believe it
heightened the pleasure with which I reined in my mare for a chat with
old Toomer the keeper, and the noble bloodhound who eyed me from between
his master’s legs.’
‘I can well believe it. Simple lines in a landscape are of the same
value as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They act both as
contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of the figure;
but to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal is mere pedantry
and Manicheism.’
‘Oh, everything is Manicheism with you, Claude!’
‘And no wonder, while the world is as full of it now as it was in the
thirteenth century. But let that pass. This craving after so-called
classic art, whether it be Manicheism or not, is certainly a fighting
against God,—a contempt of everything which He has taught us artists
since the introduction of Christianity. I abominate this setting up of
Sculpture above Painting, of the Greeks above the Italians,—as if all
Eastern civilization, all Christian truth, had taught art nothing,—as if
there was not more real beauty in a French cathedral or a Venetian
palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul in one Rafaelle, or
Titian either, than in all the Greek statues of the Tribune or Vatican.’
‘You have changed your creed, I see, and, like all converts, are somewhat
fierce and fanatical. You used to believe in Zeuxis and Parrhasius in
old times.’
‘Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli’s “Lectures;” but when I saw at
Pompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, my faith in their
powers received its first shock; and when I re-read in the Lectures of
Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises of the Greek
painters, and separated their few facts fairly out from among the floods
of rant on which they floated, I came to the conclusion that the ancients
knew as little of colour or chiaroscuro as they did of perspective, and
as little of spiritual expression as they did of landscape-painting.
What do I care for the birds pecking at Zeuxis’s grapes, or Zeuxis
himself trying to draw back Parrhasius’s curtain? Imitative art is the
lowest trickery. There are twenty men in England now capable of the same
sleight of hand; and yet these are recorded as the very highest triumphs
of ancient art by the only men who have handed down to us any record of
it.’
‘It may be so; or again, it may not. But do not fancy, Claude, that
classic sculpture has finished its work on earth. You know that it has
taught you what Gothic art could never teach,—the ideal of physical
health and strength. Believe that it exists, and will exist, to remind
the puny town-dweller of the existence of that ideal; to say to the
artisan, every time he looks upon a statue—such God intended you to be;
such you may be; such your class will be, in some future healthy state of
civilization, when Sanitary Reform and Social Science shall be accepted
and carried out as primary duties of a government toward the nation.
‘Surely, classic sculpture remains, as a witness of the primæval
paradise; a witness that man and woman were created at first healthy, and
strong, and fair, and innocent; just as classic literature remains for a
witness that the heathen of old were taught of God; that we have
something to learn of them, summed up in that now obsolete word
“virtue”—true and wholesome manhood, which we are likely to forget, and
are forgetting daily, under the enervating shadow of popular
superstitions. {287} And till we have learnt that, may Greek books still
form the basis of our liberal education, and may Greek statues, or even
English attempts to copy them, fill public halls and private houses.
This generation may not understand their divine and eternal significance;
but a future generation, doubt it not, will spell it out right well.’
Claude and I went forth along the cliffs of a park, which, though not of
the largest, is certainly of the loveliest in England,—perhaps unique,
from that abrupt contact of the richest inland scenery with the open sea,
which is its distinctive feature. As we wandered along the edge of the
cliff, beneath us on our left lay wooded valleys, lawns spotted with
deer, stately timber trees, oak and beech, birch and alder, growing as
full and round-headed as if they had been buried in some Shropshire
valley fifty miles inland, instead of having the Atlantic breezes all the
winter long sweeping past a few hundred feet above their still seclusion.
Glens of forest wound away into the high inner land, with silver burns
sparkling here and there under their deep shadows; while from the lawns
beneath, the ground sloped rapidly upwards towards us, to stop short in a
sheer wall of cliff, over which the deer were leaning to crop the shoots
of ivy, where the slipping of a stone would have sent them 400 feet
perpendicular into the sea. On our right, from our very feet, the sea
spread out to the horizon; a single falcon was wheeling about the ledges
below; a single cormorant was fishing in the breakers, diving and rising
again like some tiny water-beetle;
‘The murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered pebbles idly chafed
Could not be heard so high.’
The only sound beside the rustle of the fern before the startled deer was
the soft mysterious treble of the wind as it swept over the face of the
cliff beneath us; but the cool air was confined to the hill-tops round
beneath, from within a short distance of the shore, the sea was shrouded
in soft summer haze. The far Atlantic lay like an ocean of white wool,
out of which the Hartland Cliffs and the highest point of Lundy just
showed their black peaks. Here and there the western sun caught one
white bank of mist after another, and tinged them with glowing gold;
while nearer us long silvery zigzag tide-lines, which we could have
fancied the tracks of water-fairies, wandered away under the smoky
grey-brown shadows of the fog, and seemed to vanish hundreds of miles off
into the void of space, so completely was all notion of size or distance
destroyed by the soft gradations of the mist. Suddenly, as we stood
watching, a breeze from the eastward dived into the basin of the bay,
swept the clouds out, packed them together, rolled them over each other,
and hurled them into the air miles high in one Cordillera of snowy
mountains, sailing slowly out into the Atlantic; and behold, instead of
the chaos of mist, the whole amphitheatre of cliffs, with their gay green
woods and spots of bright red marl and cold black ironstone, and the
gleaming white sands of Braunton, and the hills of Exmoor bathed in
sunshine, so near and clear we almost fancied we could see the pink
heather-hue upon them; and the bay one vast rainbow, ten miles of
flame-colour and purple, emerald and ultramarine, flecked with a thousand
spots of flying snow. No one knows what gigantic effects of colour even
our temperate zone can show, till they have been in Devonshire and
Cornwall; and last, but not least, in Ireland—the Emerald Isle, in truth.
No stay-at-home knows the colour of the sea till he has seen the West of
England; and no one, either stay-at-home or traveller, I suspect, knows
what the colour of a green field can be till he has seen it among the
magic smiles and tears of an Irish summer shower in county Down.
Down we wandered from our height through ‘trim walks and alleys green,’
where the arbutus and gumcistus fringed the cliffs, and through the deep
glades of the park, towards the delicious little cove which bounds it.—A
deep crack in the wooded hills, an old mill half buried in rocks and
flowers, a stream tinkling on from one rock-basin to another towards the
beach, a sandy lawn gay with sea-side flowers over which wild boys and
bare-footed girls were driving their ponies with panniers full of sand,
and as they rattled back to the beach for a fresh load, standing upright
on the backs of their steeds, with one foot in each pannier, at full trot
over rocks and stones where a landsman would find it difficult to walk on
his own legs.
Enraptured with the place and people, Claude pulled out his sketch-book
and sat down.
‘What extraordinary rocks!’ said he, at length. ‘How different from
those Cyclopean blocks and walls along the Exmoor cliffs are these rich
purple and olive ironstone layers, with their sharp serrated lines and
polished slabs, set up on edge, snapped, bent double, twisted into
serpentine curves, every sheet of cliff scored with sharp parallel lines
at some fresh fantastic angle!’
Yes; there must have been strange work here when all these strata were
being pressed and squeezed together like a ream of wet paper between the
rival granite pincers of Dartmoor and Lundy. They must have suffered
enough then in a few years to give them a fair right to lie quiet till
Doomsday, as they seem likely to do. But it is only old Mother Earth who
has fallen asleep hereabouts. Air and sea are just as live as ever. Ay,
lovely and calm enough spread beneath us there the broad semicircle of
the bay; but to know what it can be, it should be seen as I have seen it,
when, in the roaring December morning, we have been galloping along the
cliffs, wreck-hunting.—One morning I can remember well, how we watched
from the Hartland Cliffs a great barque, which came drifting and rolling
in before the western gale, while we followed her up the coast, parsons
and sportsmen, farmers and Preventive men, with the Manby’s mortar
lumbering behind us in a cart, through stone gaps and track-ways, from
headland to headland.—The maddening excitement of expectation as she ran
wildly towards the cliffs at our feet, and then sheered off again
inexplicably;—her foremast and bowsprit, I recollect, were gone short off
by the deck; a few rags of sail fluttered from her main and mizen. But
with all straining of eyes and glasses, we could discern no sign of man
on board. Well I recollect the mingled disappointment and admiration of
the Preventive men, as a fresh set of salvors appeared in view, in the
form of a boat’s crew of Clovelly fishermen; how we watched breathlessly
the little black speck crawling and struggling up in the teeth of the
gale, under the shelter of the land, till, when the ship had rounded a
point into smoother water, she seized on her like some tiny spider on a
huge unwieldy fly; and then how one still smaller black speck showed
aloft on the main-yard, and another—and then the desperate efforts to get
the topsail set—and how we saw it tear out of their hands again, and
again, and again, and almost fancied we could hear the thunder of its
flappings above the roar of the gale, and the mountains of surf which
made the rocks ring beneath our feet;—and how we stood silent,
shuddering, expecting every moment to see whirled into the sea from the
plunging yards one of those same tiny black specks, in each one of which
was a living human soul, with sad women praying for him at home! And
then how they tried to get her head round to the wind, and disappeared
instantly in a cloud of white spray—and let her head fall back again—and
jammed it round again, and disappeared again—and at last let her drive
helplessly up the bay, while we kept pace with her along the cliffs; and
how at last, when she had been mastered and fairly taken in tow, and was
within two miles of the pier, and all hearts were merry with the hopes of
a prize which would make them rich, perhaps, for years to come—one-third,
I suppose, of the whole value of her cargo—how she broke loose from them
at the last moment, and rushed frantically in upon those huge rocks below
us, leaping great banks of slate at the blow of each breaker, tearing off
masses of ironstone which lie there to this day to tell the tale, till
she drove up high and dry against the cliff, and lay, like an enormous
stranded whale, grinding and crashing herself to pieces against the walls
of her adamantine cage. And well I recollect the sad records of the
log-book which was left on board the deserted ship; how she had been
waterlogged for weeks and weeks, buoyed up by her timber cargo, the crew
clinging in the tops, and crawling down, when they dared, for putrid
biscuit-dust and drops of water, till the water was washed overboard and
gone; and then notice after notice, ‘On this day such an one died,’ ‘On
this day such an one was washed away’—the log kept up to the last, even
when there was only that to tell, by the stern business-like merchant
skipper, whoever he was; and how at last, when there was neither food nor
water, the strong man’s heart seemed to have quailed, or perhaps risen,
into a prayer, jotted down in the log—‘The Lord have mercy on us!’—and
then a blank of several pages, and, scribbled with a famine-shaken hand,
‘Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth;’—and so the log and the
ship were left to the rats, which covered the deck when our men boarded
her. And well I remember the last act of that tragedy; for a ship has
really, as sailors feel, a personality, almost a life and soul of her
own; and as long as her timbers hold together, all is not over. You can
hardly call her a corpse, though the human beings who inhabited her, and
were her soul, may have fled into the far eternities; and so we felt that
night, as we came down along the woodland road, with the north-west wind
hurling dead branches and showers of crisp oak-leaves about our heads;
till suddenly, as we staggered out of the wood, we came upon such a piece
of chiaroscuro as would have baffled Correggio, or Rembrandt, himself.
Under a wall was a long tent of sails and spars, filled with Preventive
men, fishermen, Lloyd’s underwriters, lying about in every variety of
strange attitude and costume; while candles, stuck in bayonet-handles in
the wall, poured out a wild glare over shaggy faces and glittering
weapons, and piles of timber, and rusty iron cable, that glowed red-hot
in the light, and then streamed up the glen towards us through the salt
misty air in long fans of light, sending fiery bars over the brown
transparent oak foliage and the sad beds of withered autumn flowers, and
glorifying the wild flakes of foam, as they rushed across the
light-stream, into troops of tiny silver angels, that vanished into the
night and hid themselves among the woods from the fierce spirit of the
storm. And then, just where the glare of the lights and watch-fires was
most brilliant, there too the black shadows of the cliff had placed the
point of intensest darkness, lightening gradually upwards right and left,
between the two great jaws of the glen, into a chaos of grey mist, where
the eye could discern no form of sea or cloud, but a perpetual shifting
and quivering as if the whole atmosphere was writhing with agony in the
clutches of the wind.
The ship was breaking up; and we sat by her like hopeless physicians by a
deathbed-side, to watch the last struggle,—and ‘the effects of the
deceased.’ I recollect our literally warping ourselves down to the
beach, holding on by rocks and posts. There was a saddened awe-struck
silence, even upon the gentleman from Lloyd’s with the pen behind his
ear. A sudden turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam of moonshine upon
the white leaping heads of the breakers, and on the pyramid of the
Black-church Rock, which stands in summer in such calm grandeur gazing
down on the smiling bay, with the white sand of Braunton and the red
cliffs of Portledge shining through its two vast arches; and against a
slab of rock on the right, for years afterwards discoloured with her
paint, lay the ship, rising slowly on every surge, to drop again with a
piteous crash as the wave fell back from the cliff, and dragged the
roaring pebbles back with it under the coming wall of foam. You have
heard of ships at the last moment crying aloud like living things in
agony? I heard it then, as the stumps of her masts rocked and reeled in
her, and every plank and joint strained and screamed with the dreadful
tension.
A horrible image—a human being shrieking on the rack, rose up before me
at those strange semi-human cries, and would not be put away—and I tried
to turn, and yet my eyes were riveted on the black mass, which seemed
vainly to implore the help of man against the stern ministers of the
Omnipotent.
Still she seemed to linger in the death-struggle, and we turned at last
away; when, lo! a wave, huger than all before it, rushed up the boulders
towards us.—We had just time to save ourselves.—A dull, thunderous groan,
as if a mountain had collapsed, rose above the roar of the tempest; and
we all turned with an instinctive knowledge of what had happened, just in
time to see the huge mass melt away into the boiling white, and vanish
for evermore. And then the very raving of the wind seemed hushed with
awe; the very breakers plunged more silently towards the shore, with
something of a sullen compunction; and as we stood and strained our eyes
into the gloom, one black plank after another crawled up out of the
darkness upon the head of the coming surge, and threw itself at our feet
like the corpse of a drowning man, too spent to struggle more.
There is another subject for a picture for you, my friend Claude: but
your gayer fancy will prefer the scene just as you are sketching it now,
as still and bright as if this coast had never seen the bay darkened with
the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the waves before the
northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right
for the breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron walls of rock
than from the pitiless howling waste of spray behind them; and that merry
beach beside the town covered with shrieking women and old men casting
themselves on the pebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse after
corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child, till in one case alone a
single dawn saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those
who had gone out the night before in the fulness of strength and courage.
Hardly an old playmate of mine, but is drowned and gone:—
‘Their graves are scattered far and wide
By mount, by stream, and sea.’
One poor little fellow’s face starts out of the depths of memory as fresh
as ever, my especial pet and bird-nesting companion as a boy—a little
delicate, precocious, large-brained child, who might have written books
some day, if he had been a gentleman’s son: but when his father’s ship
was wrecked, they found him, left alone of all the crew, just as he had
been lashed into the rigging by loving and dying hands, but cold and
stiff, the little soul beaten out of him by the cruel waves before it had
time to show what growth there might have been in it. We will talk no
more of such things. It is thankless to be sad when all heaven and earth
are keeping holiday under the smile of God.
‘And now let us return. At four o’clock to-morrow morning, you know, we
are to start for Lundy.’