During a week's pleasant and gentle thaw [February 1870], we had hoped that the worst of winter was come and gone; but to our no small disappointment the genial interregnum has been followed by another heavy fall of snow, and a wonderfully keen and biting frost, which, borne on the wings of a surly nor'easter, has again bound up the earth as if with fetters of iron. Under such circumstances the sea-coast, we take it, presents the most dreary and desolate-looking winter picture imaginable; far more so, to our thinking, than either moss, or moorland, or mountain range. There is a something inexpressibly dismal and dowie in the black crape-like belt of sea beach which divides a landscape deeply clad with snow and frost-bound, from the dull and leaden coloured deep beyond; the dashing of the waves of said deep upon the shore, uttering the while a sadly funereal and dirge-like moan. If our inland friends, in view of the wintry waste around them, take up the cry of "O the dreary, dreary moorland"--we, dwellers by the sea coast, have the best possible right to finish the Tennysonian line by exclaiming "O the barren, barren shore." It must, by the way, have been on some fair summer eve that the Crown officials first thought of depriving landowners of the sea-shore privileges hitherto enjoyed by them; had it been in winter, the idea, it strikes us, would have withered in the bud; they would have fled the very sight of the dark and dreary "foreshore," and wisely confined themselves to the shelter of their Woods and Forests!