He had lived there long enough to see the dull monotony of one
season lapse into the dull monotony of the other. The bleak
northwest trade-winds had brought him mornings of staring sunlight
and nights of fog and silence. The warmer southwest trades had
brought him clouds, rain, and the transient glories of quick
grasses and odorous beach blossoms. But summer or winter, wet or
dry season, on one side rose always the sharply defined hills with
their changeless background of evergreens; on the other side
stretched always the illimitable ocean as sharply defined against
the horizon, and as unchanging in its hue. The onset of spring and
autumn tides, some changes among his feathered neighbors, the
footprints of certain wild animals along the river's bank, and the
hanging out of party-colored signals from the wooded hillside far
inland, helped him to record the slow months. On summer
afternoons, when the sun sank behind a bank of fog that, moving
solemnly shoreward, at last encompassed him and blotted out sea and
sky, his isolation was complete. The damp gray sea that flowed
above and around and about him always seemed to shut out an
intangible world beyond, and to be the only real presence. The
booming of breakers scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a
vague and unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past
forever. Every morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he
awoke, dazed and bewildered, as upon a new world. The first sense
of oppression over, he came to love at last this subtle spirit of
oblivion; and at night, when its cloudy wings were folded over his
cabin, he would sit alone with a sense of security he had never
felt before. On such occasions he was apt to leave his door open,
and listen as for footsteps; for what might not come to him out of
this vague, nebulous world beyond? Perhaps even SHE,--for this