This storm held on for seven or eight hours, and as the sea rose many feet higher than usual under its influence, when the tide was well in, the strife of elements, and their combined assault upon the works of men’s hands were truly grand. A breach was made through the solid causeway, compact long ago of clay, and gravel, and boulders of flint, and guarded seaward by dykes of timber. This breach was effected, I have no doubt, by the _stroke_ of the wave, as the sword of Roland is said to have cut through the rock in the fight of Roncesvalles. A wall of stout masonry, not above five feet in height, and supported behind by earthworks, so as to resemble an escarpment, yielded before the weight of water, as a pane of plate-glass would give way at the charge of a locomotive engine. Some twenty yards’ length of it was rent and thrown down. On examining this fragment afterwards, I found that the materials of the wall were solid blocks and angular bits of Wenlock limestone, and the cement used of the strongest. I believe, however, if it had been three times as strong a barrier, those waves would have levelled it. I subsequently witnessed in that very neighbourhood a yet more furious tempest of wind, but had no opportunity of measuring its effects. At Eastbourne, about two years age, I made acquaintance with a phenomenon in this line which was altogether new to my experience. We had a tremendous gale late in the autumn of 1857. I cannot exactly cite the quarter from which the wind blew, as I do not accurately know the points of the compass in their bearing on the town and bay; but the storm seemed to beat in from the south-east, as it faced the Marine Esplanade. I went forth, with perhaps a score of others, to gaze upon this magnificent “encountering shock” of earth, air, and water. We were all of us drenched to the skin by the dashing spray, and occasionally well-nigh swept off our legs by the gust; but we held on stoutly, _till_ something saluted those nearest the beach, which rendered a retreat imperative. This was not the salt spray, nor the rattling hail neither, but a cloud of “skirmishers” in the shape of _pebbles and gravel_ from the strand below. The sea had actually lifted the surface of the bed of beach, and whirled aloft some bushels of its solid contents. A coast-guard told me next day, that he saw a “flight” of pebbles, some of them as big as hens’ eggs, at least thirty feet high in the air; and he added, that if the direction of the wind had changed a little, every pane of glass on the ground and first-floor of the Esplanade must have been shivered to atoms. As it was, of course much damage was done to windows and sashes; but not by the actual pebbles. After this gale had subsided, I ascertained by personal inspection that some hundred tons’ weight of solid shingle had been moved along the shore a distance of a quarter of a mile, in the space of a few hours. This was by the sidelong _drag_ of the tide.