Page:A Book of the West (vol. 2).djvu/416

338 go, the wild sea-birds make their nests; the shags stand on the ledges of the highest rocks in silent rows gazing upon the water below; the sea-gulls fly, shrieking in sea-gullic rapture—there is surely no life quite so joyous as the sea-gull's; the curlews call; the herons sail across the sky; and in spring millions of puffins swim and dive and fly about the rocks and lay their eggs in the hollow places of these wild and lonely islands."

Is not that beautiful writing? But it is not fanciful; it is beautiful because true, absolutely true. Go and see if it be not so.

Have you ever made acquaintance with the horrors of Lowestoft, a flat insipid shore, where the sea is always charged with mud and no breakers thunder, where the land scene is as dull and insipid as is the sea-scape? I was there last summer. It was a dismal place, made the more dismal by being invaded and pervaded, spread out, exposed, devoted to the " tripper." And I fled to the west coast to see the Atlantic, with the water crystal clear, through which you look down into infinity, and to the glorious cliffs about which that transparent water tosses, shakes its silver mane, curls its waves blue and iridescent as a peacock's neck, and I wondered that any should ever visit the east coast of England.

"All the islands, except the bare rocks, are covered with down and moorland, bounded in every direction by rocky headlands and slopes covered with granite boulders. And always, day after day, they came continually upon unexpected places: strange places, beautiful places: beaches of dazzling white; wildly-heaped earns; here a cromlech, a logan slone, a barrow; a new view of sea and sky and