timed, would come sweeping up to the coach itself, spreading and rippling about the wheels and the horses’ fetlocks.  “Surely this one would engulf them,” thought the child, recalling Pharaoh and his chariots; but always the furious charge spent itself in an edge of white froth that faded to delicate salt filigree and so vanished.  When this had happened a dozen times or more, and still without disaster, he took heart and began to turn it all into a game, choosing this or that breaker and making imaginary wagers upon it; but yet the spectacle fascinated him, and still at the back of his small brain lay wonder that all this terrifying fury and uproar should always be coming to nothing.  God must be out yonder (he thought) and engaged in some mysterious form of play.  He had heard a good deal about God from Miss Quiney, his governess; but this playfulness, as an attribute of the Almighty, was new to him and hitherto unsuspected.

The beach, with here and there a break, extended for close upon twenty miles, still curving towards the headland; and the travellers covered more than two-thirds of the distance without espying a single living creature.  As the afternoon wore on the weather improved.  The sun, soon to drop behind the cliff-summits on the left, asserted itself with a last effort and shot a red gleam through a chink low in the cloud-wrack.  The shaft widened.  The breakers—­indigo-backed till now and turbid with sand in solution—­began to arch themselves in glass-green hollows, with rainbows playing on the spray of their crests.  And then—­as though the savage coast had become, at a touch of sunshine, habitable—­our travellers spied a man.

He came forth from a break in the cliffs half a mile ahead and slowly crossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began, after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards.  His back was turned thus upon the Collector’s equipage, to which in crossing the beach he had given no attention, being old and purblind.

The coach rolled so smoothly, and the jingle of harness was so entirely swallowed in the roar of the sea, that Captain Vyell, pushing ahead and overtaking the old fellow, had to ride close up to his shoulder and shout.  It appeared then, for further explanation, that his hearing as well as his eyesight was none of the best.  He faced about in a puzzled fashion, stared, and touched his hat—­or rather lifted his hand a little way and dropped it again.

“Your Honour will be the Collector,” he said, and nodded many times, at first as if proud of his sagacity, but afterwards dully—­as though his interest had died out and he would have ceased nodding but had forgotten the way.  “Yes; my gran’-darter told me.  She’s in service at the Bowling Green, Port Nassau; but walks over on Lord’s Days to cheer up her mother and tell the news.  They’ve been expectin’ you at Port Nassau any time this week.”

The Collector asked where he lived, and the old man pointed to a gully in the cliff and to something which, wedged in the gully, might at a first glance be taken for a large and loosely-constructed bird’s nest.  The Collector’s keen eyes made it out to be a shanty of timber roofed with shingles and barely overtopping a wood pile.