It was indeed a desolate place. Shell-fish in serried ranks, and weeds in dark and slippery masses, clung to the sea-washed rocks. A few crabs and shrimps had remained captive in the shallow pools of water, where they waited the returning tide. Long algae, all wet and tangled, and light feathery sprigs, delicate enough to be wreathed in the green hair of pale mermaids, were strewn on the beach, but other tokens of life and vegetation there were none. The sea breeze, which moaned along that wall of rock and cliff, fanned and stirred not one blade of yellowish grass on its way. Here ceased the freshness and verdure of earth; here began a nature other than that of the poets, yet not without its own beauty, contrasts, and harmonies. "It is grand, but wonderfully dreary," said Cornelius, "let us go back, Daisy." "Not yet. Do you see that hollow nook perched up there between earth and sky, close by the fountain?" "Well, what about it?" "There is a very fine prospect from it." "How do you know?" "I often go there." "You!" he exclaimed, with an astonished look that amused me, "and pray how do you get there?" "Look!" I sprang up a steep path in the rock; every step of it was familiar to me; I had reached the hollow, and was laughing down at Cornelius, before he recovered from his amazement. He followed me lightly, but chid me all the way. "What could tempt you to do such a mad thing and to come to such an eyrie as this?" he asked as he stood by me in the wide hollow and under the broad shelter of an overhanging rock. "Look at that glorious prospect, Cornelius," I replied, sitting down and making him sit down by me. I remember well both the day and the spot. The blue sky, the sea of a blue still more deep, the yellow beach, the brown wall of rock, gave back the same ardent glow; the place seemed enchanted into the quietness of noon, save when some solitary raven suddenly left a cleft in the rock and, descending with a swoop, hovered a black speck over the beach in search of prey. We sat pleasantly within reach of the cool spray of the spring; a breeze from above brought us the sweet scent of unseen fields of gorse in bloom; below us the sea boiled in white and angry surf amongst the rocks, and thence spread away in seemingly unbroken smoothness, until it met and mingled with the distant horizon. "What do you think of my eyrie, Cornelius?" I said, after a long pause. "So you come here often?" was his reply. "Yes, very often." "What can attract you to such a wild spot?" "Its wildness." He looked me in the face and smiled. I resumed-- "I was born by the sea, Cornelius, and I love it, ay, very dearly; this barren spot seems pleasanter to me than any sunny landscape. I could listen for hours to the wind sweeping down the coast and the dash of the heaving waves. Could not you?"