the water stood there in wide, shallow pools. But when one looked in
the evening they were pools of blood that lay there.

It was a wild, dismal stretch of coast. One day, I found myself
there all alone--I forget how it came about--and, oh, how small I
felt amid the sky and the sea and the sandhills! I ran, and ran, and
ran, but I never seemed to move; and then I cried, and screamed,
louder and louder, and the circling seagulls screamed back mockingly
at me. It was an "unken" spot, as they say up North.

In the far back days of the building of the world, a long, high ridge
of stones had been reared up by the sea, dividing the swampy
grassland from the sand. Some of these stones--"pebbles," so they
called them round about--were as big as a man, and many as big as a
fair-sized house; and when the sea was angry--and very prone he was
to anger by that lonely shore, and very quick to wrath; often have I
known him sink to sleep with a peaceful smile on his rippling waves,
to wake in fierce fury before the night was spent--he would snatch up
giant handfuls of these pebbles and fling and toss them here and
there, till the noise of their rolling and crashing could be heard by
the watchers in the village afar off.

"Old Nick's playing at marbles to-night," they would say to one
another, pausing to listen. And then the women would close tight
their doors, and try not to hear the sound.

Far out to sea, by where the muddy mouth of the river yawned wide,
there rose ever a thin white line of surf, and underneath those
crested waves there dwelt a very fearsome thing, called the Bar. I
grew to hate and be afraid of this mysterious Bar, for I heard it