Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/540

532 preceding wave waxing thinner, the white curls of the next already beginning to be glassed in the moist sands below, we make our venture. Once or twice I, who am over-adventurous, am caught by the hissing water waist-high, but I cling to a rock till the feeling as if hundreds of pounds weight were pulling at my feet has passed away; and, in fact, I think I rather like the excitement of the situation than not. These essays have to be made as often as we reach a spot where the tide has not fallen far enough to suit our purpose, and nature has bored no arch for us, no crevice which we can creep through to the beach beyond. Now we discover the Maiden-hair growing far up in the rift of a detached mass of rock, and now we come upon the track of a seal at the mouth of one of the caves. In one place, the only point we have found a break, the central portion of the cliff opens back, on either hand, into a low alluvial valley; where the marigolds, as we are informed, in spring time burn like fiery stars amid the rank marsh-grasses; and out of this a famous trout-stream comes gliding, slipping down from musical waterbreak to waterbreak, and then away quietly over the yellow sands to the sea. This is Freshwater Bay. I wish I might venture another illustration, or indeed that I had it in my power to give you a series of careful “studies” by some more “eminent hand,” of the whole coast.

At last we reach that point, however, which is to be the ultimatum of our explorations for the day. This is Bedruthan Steps—why so called I know not; the bay which, among the aborigines of the district, at all events, is more famous than all the rest. Its peculiarity, its chief beauty, in fact, in the country people’s eyes, consists in the tall pinnacles of rock, which the sea, wearing away the softer strata in by-gone ages, has left standing isolated upon the sands here and there.

We sit down here at the foot of the cliff to rest after our scrambling, and to study the singular appearance of these pinnacles at our ease in the shade. We are alone; we have this wide expanse of rock and water all to ourselves. Nothing moves near us. Only a wide-winged cormorant comes dropping down the face of the cliff, and at our shout starts seaward, beating with grey wings against the horizon, and rapidly lessening to the view. The old thunder that we spoke of—the same, not changed from what it was when we were children and played with our playmates upon the shore, and frolicked and laughed, and built our castles, not in the air, but of sand, and which we heard, calling to us, it seemed, as we lay awake in the early morning in those very cramped lodgings at the glorious “sea-side”—is in our ears. And this sea? I have spoken of its depth, nor merely of its depth, the purity of its colour before. Not the deep-sea green of the Atlantic; nor the limpid blue of the Mediterranean, where it breaks on the Ionian Islands; nor the golden waters—golden as of sifted sunlight—of the Bosphorus, are so noticeable in this respect.

We smoke quietly while it draws near and ever nearer, for the tide has turned now—stealing with stealthy footsteps across the sand. With it the wind is rising, and drives shorewards the foam and spray. Those anemones in the cleft of that rock near us feel the touch of the salt brine, and begin to open their gorgeous petals. Look! the sea has reached our “pinnacles,” and is flashing and whirling about their bases now. From point to point there is a broad band of water rolling ten feet deep across the mouth of every one of the coves. Our retreat is cut off in the way by which we came. Fortunately there is a path here also which leads to the downs above. Between this and the point where we descended there had been little hope of escape had we been caught by the advancing tide. As we turn at the summit and look along the shore, we see the whole range of promontories standing like giants knee-deep in the amethyst brine, and lit by the reflected light of that sun which is low down now in the summer sky. With my mind still running upon the “Morte d’Arthur”—I think it has been so ever since I came into this part of Cornwall—I cannot help repeating aloud the Laureate’s lines:—

All down the lonely coast of Lyonnesse,

Each with a beacon-star upon his head,

And with a wild sea-light about his feet,

We saw them—headland after headland flame

Far on into the rich heart of the West.

We are going westward now. We have made up our minds not to return to St. Columb, but to take up our quarters at Newquay for the night. Picturesque it is surely, the grey little town yonder, crowding down with all its houses to the sea, beaten with the Atlantic winds and dashed with the Atlantic spray of these hundreds of years past—the golden clouds drooping over it, and the quiet sun going down beyond to his rest Pleasant it is beyond a doubt to lie, as we do a little later, on the fair green downs above it while the last embers of the sunset are smouldering in the west—the orange misting into violet, and the violet into grey—and out of the deepening twilight and far mysterious murmur of the seas the fishing-boats flit, one by one, softly inward, to rest with folded wings in the great cliff-shadows.—

The bay is oily-calm; the harbour buoy

With one green sparkle ever and anon

Dips to itself; and we are glad at heart.

2em

love me well, I know, wife, In spite of frown and toss; In the moonlight long ago, wife, You didn’t look so cross; In your little scarlet cloak, dear, You tripp’d along the moss, And all at once I spoke, dear, Though sadly at a loss.

You hung your pretty head, then, And answer’d very low; I scarce heard what you said, then, But I knew it wasn’t “No.” My joy I couldn’t speak, love, But, a hundred times or so, I kiss’d a velvet cheek, love, In the moonlight long ago.