of early day. Away to the north-west is Sandsend Ness, a bold headland
full of purple and blue shadows, and straight out to sea, across the
white-capped waves, are two tramp steamers, making, no doubt, for South
Shields or some port where a cargo of coal can be picked up. They are
plunging heavily, and every moment their bows seem to go down too far
to recover.

On mornings when the sea is quieter there are few who can resist the
desire to plunge into the blue waters, for at seven o'clock the shore is
so entirely deserted that one seems to be bathing from some primeval
shore where no other forms of life may be expected than some giant
crustaceans. This thought, perhaps, prompted the painful sensations I
allowed to prey upon me one night when I was walking along this
particular piece of shore from Whitby. I had decided to save time over
the road to Sandsend by getting on to the beach at Upgang, where the
lifeboat-house stands, by the entrance to a small beck. So dark was the
night that I could scarcely be sure that I had not lost my way, until I
had carefully felt the walls of the boat-house. Then I stepped
cautiously on to the sand, which I discovered as soon as my feet began
sinking at every step.

The harbour lights of Whitby were bright enough, but in the other
direction I could be sure of nothing. At first I seemed to have made a
mistake as to the state of the tide, for there appeared to be a
whiteness nearly up to the base of the cliffs; but this proved to be the
suffused glow from the lighthouses. Rain had been falling heavily for
the last few days, and had produced so many wide streams across the sand
that my knowledge of the usual ones merely hampered me. At first I began
stepping carefully over large black hollows in the sand, and then a
great black mark would show itself, which, offering no resistance to my