The sun was already changing its early glory to heat.  All the erections for amusement on the shore looked a little foolish in that solitude.  I returned to the town along the empty asphalt roads and went with my companions to church.  It was a church whose pretensions were high and genteel.  Nothing of a personal nature was ever heard from its well-bred pulpit.  The hymns were discreetly chosen to avoid excitement, and a conversion would have given offence.  The minister for that day was a young man from the poorer end of the town, and I remember, even as a child, being disturbed by the announcement of his first hymn, “Rock of Ages.”  Even the organ blundered as it played so common a tune as Rousseau’s Dream, and I, who learning counterpoint, feared to be seen singing so ordinary a melody, lest it should set me down as unmusical for ever.  But soon my concern was with the unfortunate young man, for he was, I felt sure, quite ignorant of the habits of such congregations as ours, and would certainly offend our best people.  For after that we read the parable of the Prodigal Son and sang, “The Sands of Time are Sinking.”  Then I forgot even this curious lapse from our Sunday custom, so clearly did the tale now begun by the preacher bring again before my eyes those inhuman sands, that lonely sky, and the unstayed power of the sea.

He had chosen, so he said, for his service this morning the favourite hymns, Scripture, and text of an obscure member of the congregation taken from earth in a strange manner the day before.  For more years than he could remember, there had come and gone in that congregation an old blind man.  He had heard him spoken of from time to time in a kindly contemptuous, way as “Old Born Again,” and it was by that nickname he would speak of him this morning, but he could find no place in his intelligence for contempt, for Old Born Again now saw and knew the things which prophets and kings desire to look into.

He had lived for many years thus.  He was a widower living with a married daughter, whose husband was a fisherman.  She herself kept a greengrocer’s shop of the poorer kind.  She had five children, the eldest, a boy of thirteen, earning his living with her in the shop.  He and his blind grandfather went round the district every day with a small cart and horse, selling their vegetables from house to house and thus enlarging their custom.  The boy guided the horse and his grandfather helped with the selling and the money.  In the early morning at the end of each week they drove the horse and cart to the sea’s edge to wash them, making always for the steady channel which ran unaltering through the empty sand, when the tide was down.  This morning they had gone as usual, and when they reached the water (the old man was blind you will remember, and his companion a child), they knew no difference in its appearance.  A man who was gathering cockles at a distance knew and called to them, running towards them, but the old man did not see and the boy was intent upon guiding the horse and cart into the water.