On the land there was but little wind.  There was an inexplicable dumbness in the cold.  There was no hail.  The thickness of the falling snow was fearful.

Hailstones strike, harass, bruise, stun, crush.  Snowflakes do worse:  soft and inexorable, the snowflake does its work in silence; touch it, and it melts.  It is pure, even as the hypocrite is candid.  It is by white particles slowly heaped upon each other that the flake becomes an avalanche and the knave a criminal.

The child continued to advance into the mist.  The fog presents but a soft obstacle; hence its danger.  It yields, and yet persists.  Mist, like snow, is full of treachery.  The child, strange wrestler at war with all these risks, had succeeded in reaching the bottom of the descent, and had gained Chesil.  Without knowing it he was on an isthmus, with the ocean on each side; so that he could not lose his way in the fog, in the snow, or in the darkness, without falling into the deep waters of the gulf on the right hand, or into the raging billows of the high sea on the left.  He was travelling on, in ignorance, between these two abysses.

The Isthmus of Portland was at this period singularly sharp and rugged.  Nothing remains at this date of its past configuration.  Since the idea of manufacturing Portland stone into Roman cement was first seized, the whole rock has been subjected to an alteration which has completely changed its original appearance.  Calcareous lias, slate, and trap are still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth from a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and levelled those bristling, rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage.  The summits exist no longer where the labbes and the skua gulls used to flock together, soaring, like the envious, to sully high places.  In vain might you seek the tall monolith called Godolphin, an old British word, signifying “white eagle.”  In summer you may still gather on those surfaces, pierced and perforated like a sponge, rosemary, pennyroyal, wild hyssop, and sea-fennel which when infused makes a good cordial, and that herb full of knots, which grows in the sand and from which they make matting; but you no longer find gray amber, or black tin, or that triple species of slate—­one sort green, one blue, and the third the colour of sage-leaves.  The foxes, the badgers, the otters, and the martens have taken themselves off; on the cliffs of Portland, as well as at the extremity of Cornwall, where there were at one time chamois, none remain.  They still fish in some inlets for plaice and pilchards; but the scared salmon no longer ascend the Wey, between Michaelmas and Christmas, to spawn.  No more are seen there, as during the reign of Elizabeth, those old unknown birds as large as hawks, who could cut an apple in two, but ate only the pips.  You never meet those crows with yellow beaks, called Cornish choughs in English, pyrrocorax in Latin, who, in their