when the wan light of the morning broke.  The girl stared steadily, and her face was like that of a corpse.  The barque swung southward, and with the speed of a railway engine rushed on to the stones; the pretty girl moaned, “Oh me!—­oh me!” She never saw her lad again until his battered body was in the dead-house of the pier.  A commonplace red-haired woman was in a dreadful state of mind when she saw a large fishing-boat trying to run for the harbour.  Her husband and two sons were aboard, she said, so she had reasons for anxiety.  The boat was pitched about like a cork; and presently one fearful sea fairly smashed her.  The red-haired woman fell down upon the sand, and lay there moaning.

Assuredly I am not inclined to imitate the Cockney frivolity of Barry Cornwall, who never went to sea in his life, but who nevertheless carolled the most absurdly joyous lays regarding the ocean, which made him ill even when he merely looked at it.  No; the true sea-lover knows that there are terror and mystery and horror as well as joyousness in the varied moods of the treacherous, remorseless, magnificent ocean.  Those who read this may see the unspeakable beauty of the opaline and ruby tints that flame on the water when the sunset sinks behind the Isle of Thanet.  The bay at Westgate will shine like mother-of-pearl, and the glassy rollers at the horizon will be incarnardined.  That is a splendid sight!  Then those who are in Devon may pass sleepy days in gazing on a vivid piercing blue that is pure and brilliant as the blue of the Bay of Naples.  In the lochs to the West of Scotland the swarming tourists watch that riot of colour that marks the times of sunrise and sunset.  All these spectacles of suave magnificence are imposing; but, for my own part, I love the grey water on the East Coast, and I like the low level dunes where the bent grass gleams and the sea-wind comes whispering “Forget!” All the gay days of the holiday-places, all the gorgeous sunsets, the imperial noondays, the solemn, glittering midnights are imposing, but the wise traveller learns to see the beauty of all the moods of the wild changing sea.  Observe the commonplace man’s attitude on a grey cheerless day, when the sky hangs low and the rollers are leaden.  “A beast of a day!” he remarks in his elegant fashion; and he goes and grumbles in the vile parlour of his lodging-house, where the stuffy odour of aged chairs and the acrid smell of clumsy cookery contend for mastery.  Yet outside on the moaning levels of the dim sea there are mysterious and ghostly sights that might move the heart of the veriest stockbroker if he would but force his mind to consider them.  Look at that dark tremulous stream that seems to flow over the sullen sea.  It is but a cat’s-paw of wind, and yet it looks like a river flowing in silence from some fairy region.  The boats start out of the haze and glide away into dimness after having shown their phantom shadows for a few seconds; the cry of the gull rings weirdly; the simulated agony