inspire a causeless apprehension: they are omens
sometimes--omens of coming tempest. Nature,--incomprehensible
Sphinx!--before her mightiest bursts of rage, ever puts forth her
divinest witchery, makes more manifest her awful beauty ...

But in that forgotten summer the witchery lasted many long
days,--days born in rose-light, buried in gold. It was the
height of the season. The long myrtle-shadowed village was
thronged with its summer population;--the big hotel could hardly
accommodate all its guests;--the bathing-houses were too few for
the crowds who flocked to the water morning and evening. There
were diversions for all,--hunting and fishing parties, yachting
excursions, rides, music, games, promenades. Carriage wheels
whirled flickering along the beach, seaming its smoothness
noiselessly, as if muffled. Love wrote its dreams upon the sand
...

... Then one great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to
yawn over the world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change
touched the quicksilver smoothness of the waters--the swaying
shadow of a vast motion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to
rise up bodily at the sky; the horizon-curve lifted to a straight
line; the line darkened and approached,--a monstrous wrinkle, an
immeasurable fold of green water, moving swift as a cloud-shadow
pursued by sunlight. But it had looked formidable only by
startling contrast with the previous placidity of the open: it
was scarcely two feet high;--it curled slowly as it neared the
beach, and combed itself out in sheets of woolly foam with a low,
rich roll of whispered thunder. Swift in pursuit another
followed--a third--a feebler fourth; then the sea only swayed a