Page:On the Coromandel Coast.djvu/35

 mother from punishment. Needless to say the law did not deal severely with the poor creature.

To an English mind that has had no experience of the East the term sea-beach conjures up visions of yellow sand, bathing-machines, groups of happy children, idle men and women taking a well-earned holiday. The long straight shore at Madras has nothing in common with the English beach. Yellow sand there is in abundance, in far greater abundance now than when my foot first touched it. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century the spray of the waves fell upon the old walls of Fort St. George, and there was no driving road between the beach and the sea-gate. In 1877 the road had been made. At only a few yards distance from it the skeleton of a wreck lay half buried in the sand. As the building of the southern arm of the harbour progressed the sea retreated, throwing up broad stretches of sand behind it, until now in the present day the waves break more than half a mile from the spot where I passed through the surf. Patches of vegetation are finding foothold in the sand; and that prince of sandbinders, the goat's-foot creeper (Ipomwa pes-caprce), is extending its strong arms, adorned with blue-green foliage and wine-coloured flowers of the convolvulus form, over the very spot where the rolling wave sent our boat ashore with a mad rush of tumbling water. Another marked feature has made its appearance since that time, altering the very character of the beach and modifying its desolate look. Groves of casuarina trees the Tinian pine (Casuarina muricata) have been planted. The tree grows readily in the loose yellow sand which even the sandbinder takes time to conquer. The fine drooping pine-like foliage is of a soft sea-green, and the wind soughs through it with an answering echo to the moan of the sea. The plantations at Madras are sufficiently thick and well-grown to mask