levels, flooding and brimming and overcoming, till it broke at our
feet once more. Behind us rose the tumultuous curves and peaks of the
Welsh hills; before us, but invisible across the Irish Channel, the
black coast of rainy Ireland. One night, during a gale, a ship came
ashore, so far out that it still seemed, in the morning, to be at sea,
except for its motionlessness, and the drenched and draggled crew came
straggling in--or some of them. At Southport the beach was narrower
and the little sea-side settlement larger and livelier; a string of
sleepy donkeys always waited there, with the rout of ragged and
naughty little boys with sticks to thrash them into a perfunctory and
reluctant gallop for their riders. There was always one boy, larger
and also naughtier than the rest, who thrashed the thrashers and took
their pennies away from them. The prevailing occupation of the
children at these places, as on all civilized shores, apparently, was
the building of sand-mountains and the digging of pits with their
little wooden spades. One day an elderly gentleman, with a square,
ruddy face, edged with gray whiskers, who had stood observing my
labors in this kind for a long time, stepped up to me as I paused, and
said, with a sort of amused seriousness, "You'll do something when you
grow up, my little lad; your hill is bigger than any of the others'."
He nodded kindly to me and walked off, and I sat down beside my
mountain and watched the tide come up and level it, thinking
unutterable boy-thoughts.

The only approach to sea-side cliffs that we saw was at Whitby, on the
Yorkshire coast, where the abbey of St. Hilda stood, after whom the
American maiden in The Marble Faun was named. But the German Ocean was
bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than
elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than
to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British