it, and the part between the town and the sea reminded me a good deal of the estuary above Cardigan, flat ill-looking bogs (generally islands) among the water.  I walked to the mouth of the river (more than two miles) passing a nice little place called Sandford, with a hotel and a lot of lodgings for summer sea-people.  At the entrance of the river is a coastguard station, and this I find is the place to which I must go in the morning to observe the tide.  I had some talk with the coastguard people, and they assure me that the tide is really double as reported.  As I came away the great full moon was rising, and I could read in her unusually broad face (indicating her nearness to the earth) that there will be a powerful tide.  I came in and have had dinner and tea, and am now going to bed, endeavouring to negociate for a breakfast at six o’clock to-morrow morning.  It is raining cats and dogs.

* * * * *

LUCE’S HOTEL, WEYMOUTH,
1842, Feb. 27.

This morning when I got up I found that it was blowing fresh from S.W. and the sea was bursting over the wall of the eastern extremity of the Esplanade very magnanimously.  So (the swell not being favourable for tide-observations) I gave them up and determined to go to see the surf on the Chesil Bank.  I started with my great-coat on, more for defence against the wind than against rain; but in a short time it began to rain, and just when I was approaching the bridge which connects the mainland with the point where the Chesil Bank ends at Portland (there being an arm of the sea behind the Chesil Bank) it rained and blew most dreadfully.  However I kept on and mounted the bank and descended a little way towards the sea, and there was the surf in all its glory.  I cannot give you an idea of its majestic appearance.  It was evidently very high, but that was not the most striking part of it, for there was no such thing as going within a considerable distance of it (the occasional outbreaks of the water advancing so far) so that its magnitude could not be well seen.  My impression is that the height of the surf was from 10 to 20 feet.  But the striking part was the clouds of solid spray which formed immediately and which completely concealed all the other operations of the water.  They rose a good deal higher than the top of the surf, so the state of things was this.  A great swell is seen coming, growing steeper and steeper; then it all turns over and you see a face just like the pictures of falls of Niagara; but in a little more than one second this is totally lost and there is nothing before you but an enormous impenetrable cloud of white spray.  In about another second there comes from the bottom of this cloud the foaming current of water up the bank, and it returns grating the pebbles together till their jar penetrates the very brain.  I stood in the face of the wind and rain watching this a good while, and should have stood longer but that I was