speech--an impetuous torrent of words in a high shrill voice.
He reminded me of a lark in a cage. Watch it in its prison
when the sun shines forth--when, like the captive falcon in
Dante, it is "cheated by a gleam"--its wing-tremblings, and
all its little tentative motions, how the excitement grows and
grows in it, until, although shut up and flight denied it, the
passion can no longer be contained and it bursts out in a
torrent of shrill and guttural sounds, which, if it were free
and soaring, would be its song. His passion was all for
nature, and his mother out of her small earnings had managed
to get quite a number of volumes together for him. These he
read and re-read until he knew them by heart; and on Sundays,
or any other day they could take, those two lonely ones would
take a basket containing their luncheon, her work and a book
or two, and set out on a long ramble along the coast to pass
the day in some solitary spot among the sandhills.

With these two, the gentle woman and her quiet boy over his
book, and the kitchen fire to warm and dry us after each
wetting, the bad weather became quite bearable although it
lasted many days. And it was amazingly bad. The wind blew
with a fury from the sea; it was hard to walk against it. The
people in hundreds waited in their dull apartments for a lull,
and when it came they poured out like hungry sheep from the
fold, or like children from a school, swarming over the green
slope down to the beach, to scatter far and wide over the
sands. Then, in a little while; a new menacing blackness
would come up out of the sea, and by and by a fresh storm of
wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter. So it
went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the