I

’Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea know the sea’s prophecy.  They know that there is a deeper sympathy between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of.  They know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing tablet of the moon and stars.  When a child who, born beside the sea, and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it; when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire, then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told him all it dares tell or can.  And, in other moods of fate, when beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels, as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near at hand, or, at least, not far off.’

One lovely summer afternoon a little boy was sitting on the edge of the cliff that skirts the old churchyard of Raxton-on-Sea.  He was sitting on the grass close to the brink of the indentation cut by the water into the horse-shoe curve called by the fishermen Mousetrap Cove; sitting there as still as an image of a boy in stone, at the forbidden spot where the wooden fence proclaimed the crumbling hollow crust to be specially dangerous—­sitting and looking across the sheer deep gulf below.

Flinty Point on his right was sometimes in purple shadow and sometimes shining in the sun; Needle Point on his left was sometimes in purple shadow and sometimes shining in the sun; and beyond these headlands spread now the wide purple, and now the wide sparkle of the open sea.  The very gulls, wheeling as close to him as they dared, seemed to be frightened at the little boy’s peril.  Straight ahead he was gazing, however—­gazing so intently that his eyes must have been seeing very much or else very little of that limitless world of light and coloured shade.  On account of certain questions connected with race that will be raised in this narrative, I must dwell a little while upon the child’s personal appearance, and especially upon his colour.  Natural or acquired, it was one that might be almost called unique; as much like a young Gypsy’s colour as was compatible with respectable descent, and yet not a Gypsy’s colour.  A deep undertone of ‘Romany brown’ seemed breaking through that peculiar kind of ruddy golden glow which no sunshine can give till it has itself been deepened and coloured and enriched by the responsive kisses of the sea.