been caressed and coloured by sun and wind.

How beautiful are the feet of these girls by the sea who bring
us glad tidings of a better time to come and the day of a
nobler courage, a freer larger life when garments which have
long oppressed and hindered shall have been cast away!
It was, as I have said, mere chance which had brought so many
persons of a particular type together on this occasion, and I
thought I might go there year after year and never see the
like again. As a fact I did return when August came round and
found a crowd of a different character. The type was there
but did not predominate: it was no longer the herd of
beautiful white and strawberry cows with golden horns and
large placid eyes. Nothing in fact was the same, for when I
looked for the swifts there were no more than about twenty
birds instead of over a hundred, and although just on the eve
of departure they were not behaving in the same excited
manner.

Probably I should not have thought so much about that
particular crowd in that tempestuous August, and remembered it
so vividly, but for the presence of three persons in it and
the strange contrast they made to the large white type I have
described. These were a woman and her two little girls, aged
about eight and ten respectively, but very small for their
years. She was a little black haired and black-eyed woman
with a pale sad dark face, on which some great grief or
tragedy had left its shadow; very quiet and subdued in her
manner; she would sit on a chair on the beach when the weather
permitted, a book on her knees, while her two little ones