They climbed the steep road, overhung with trees, at whose roots grew clusters of large primrose leaves, showing what a lovely walk it must be in spring; then higher, till all this vegetation ceased, leaving only the short grass cropped by the sheep, the purple thistles, and the furze-bushes, yellow and cheerful all the year round. They then drove along a high ridge for a mile or two, till they got quite out of sight of Kingcombe Holm. Miss Valery talked gaily the whole way; and, as though the sea-breeze truly gave her life, was the very first to propose leaving the carriage and walking on, so as to catch the earliest glimpse of the Channel. “There!” she said, breathlessly, and quitting Mr. Harper's arm, crossed over to his wife. “There, Agatha!” It was such a view as in her life the young girl had never beheld. They stood on a high ridge, on one side of which lay a wide champaign of moorland, on the other a valley, bounded by a second ridge, and between the two sloping greenly down, till it terminated in a little bay. Parallel to the valley ran this grand hill-terrace--until it likewise reached the coast, ending abruptly in precipitous gigantic cliffs, against which the tides of centuries might have beat themselves in vain. Beyond all, motionless in the noonday dazzle, and curving itself away in a mist of brightness where the eye failed, was the great, wide, immeasurable sea. The three stood gazing, but no one spoke. Agatha trembled, less with her former fear than with that awestruck sense of the infinite which is always given by the sight of the ocean--that ocean which One “holdeth in the hollow of his hand.” Gradually this awe grew fainter, and she was able to look round her, and count the white dots scattered here and there on the dazzling sheet of waves. “There go the ships,” said Nathanael. “See what numbers of them--numbers, yet how few they seem!--are moving up and down on this highway of all nations. Look, Agatha, at that one, a mere speck, dipping in the horizon. “Do you remember Tennyson's lines?--they reached Uncle Brian and me even in the wild forests of America: “'Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail Which brings our friends up from the under world; Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks, with all we love, below the verge.'” “There! it is gone now,” cried Agatha, almost with a sense of loss. She felt Anne Valery's fingers tighten convulsively over her arm, and saw her with straining eyes and quivering lips watching the vanishing--nay, vanished--ship, as if all her soul were flying with it to the “under world.”