waves that girdle them and sport like the fabled monsters of marine
mythology. Seal, sea-leopard, or sea-lion--whatever they may be--they
cry with one voice night and day; and it is not a pleasant cry either,
though a far one, they mouth so horribly. Long ago it inspired a wit to
madness and he made a joke; the same old joke has been made by those who
followed after him. It will continue to be made with impertinent
impunity until the sea gives up its seals; for the temptation is there
daily and hourly, and the humorist is but human--he can not long resist
it; so he will buttonhole you on the veranda of the Cliff House and
whisper in your astonished ear as if he were imparting a state secret:
"Their bark is on the sea!"

The way home was sometimes a weary one. After leaving the bluff above
the shore, we struck into an almost interminable succession of
sand-dunes. There was neither track nor trail there; there was no oasis
to gladden us with its vision of beauty. The pale poet of destiny and
despair has written:

In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree;
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

There was no fountain in our desert, and we knew it well enough; for we
had often braved its sands. In that wide waste there was not even the
solitary tree that moved the poet to song; nor a bird in our solitude,
save a sea-gull cutting across-lots from the ocean to the bay in search
of a dinner. There were some straggling vines on the edge of our desert,
thick-leaved and juicy; and these were doing their best to keep from
getting buried alive. The sand was always shifting out yonder, and there