noisy--though she could not have learned the difference--than the
play of city children. Hour after hour, the women sewed or wove
in silence. And the brown men,--always barefooted, always
wearing rough blue shirts,--seemed, when they lounged about the
wharf on idle days, as if they had told each other long ago all
they knew or could ever know, and had nothing more to say. They
would stare at the flickering of the current, at the drifting of
clouds and buzzard:--seldom looking at each other, and always
turning their black eyes again, in a weary way, to sky or sea.
Even thus one sees the horses and the cattle of the coast,
seeking the beach to escape the whizzing flies;--all watch the
long waves rolling in, and sometimes turn their heads a moment to
look at one another, but always look back to the waves again, as
if wondering at a mystery....

How often she herself had wondered--wondered at the multiform
changes of each swell as it came in--transformations of tint, of
shape, of motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more
subtle than the strange cold life of lizards and of fishes,--and
sinister, and spectral. Then they all appeared to move in
order,--according to one law or impulse;--each had its own voice,
yet all sang one and the same everlasting song. Vaguely, as she
watched them and listened to them, there came to her the idea of
a unity of will in their motion, a unity of menace in their
utterance--the idea of one monstrous and complex life! The sea
lived: it could crawl backward and forward; it could speak!--it
only feigned deafness and sightlessness for some malevolent end.
Thenceforward she feared to find herself alone with it. Was it
not at her that it strove to rush, muttering, and showing its
white teeth, ... just because it knew that she was all by