While Philip was busied with them, the others continued their course down to the shore; the children, hand-in-hand, skipping over the sand-hills, and stopping to pick up stones; Sarah strolling slowly after them. She had seen the ocean surf before, but never aught like this, with its huge swells of water, a mile in length, gathering blackness and height on their landward career; as they struck the invisible barriers that commanded, "Thus far and no farther!" breaking in white fury, with the leap of a baffled fiend, and a roar like thunder, against their resistless opponent, then recoiling, sullenly, to gather new force for another, and as useless an attack. The beach was wide and uneven, of sand, whose whiteness would have glared intolerably had the day been sunny, drifted into hillocks and undulating ridges, like the waves of the sea. Here and there the hardy heather found a foothold amid the otherwise blank sterility, the green patches adding to, rather than lessening the wild, desolate aspect of the tract. Fragments of timber were strewn in all directions, and Sarah's quick eye perceived that it was not formless, chance driftwood. There were hewn beams and shapely spars, and planks in which great iron bolts were still fast. When Philip overtook her, she was standing by an immense piece of solid wood, lying far beyond the reach of the highest summer tides. One end was buried in the sand; the other, bleached by sun and wind, and seamed with cracks, was curved like the extremity of a bow. Her late embarrassment or hauteur was forgotten in the direct earnestness of her appealing look. "Am I mistaken?" she said, in a low, awed tone. "Is not this the keel of a ship?" "It is. There have been many wrecked on this coast." "Here!" She glanced from the fierce, bellowing breakers to the melancholy testimonials of their destructive might. "I have never heard that this was esteemed a dangerous point."