We both fell into a reverie. The story and the ballad were finished, and not a sound broke the silence except the screaming of the sea-fowl, which led my thoughts wandering back to nights long past, when we dragged the seine up to our chins in water through the short midsummer night, and scrambled and rolled over on the beach in boyish glee, after the skate and mullet, with those now gone; and as I thought and thought, old voices seemed to call me, old faces looked at me, of playmates, and those nearer than playmates, now sleeping in the deep deep sea, amid far coral islands; and old figures seemed to glide out of the mysterious dark along the still sea floor, as if the ocean were indeed giving up her dead. I shook myself, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I was dreaming. Perhaps I had been doing so. At least, I remember very little more, till I was roused by the rattling of the chain-cable through the hawse-hole, opposite the pier-head. And now, gentle readers, farewell; and farewell, Clovelly, and all the loving hearts it holds; and farewell, too, the soft still summer weather. Claude and I are taking our last walk together along the deer-park cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of dappled haze which streams up from the westward, dimming the sickly sun. ‘There is not a breath the blue wave to curl.’ Yet lo! round Chapman’s Head creeps a huge bank of polished swell, and bursts in thunder on the cliffs.—Another follows, and another.—The Atlantic gales are sending in their avant-courriers of ground-swell: six hours more, and the storm which has been sweeping over ‘the still-vexed Bermoöthes,’ and bending the tall palms on West Indian isles, will be roaring through the oak woods of Devon. The old black buck is calling his does with ominous croakings, and leading the way slowly into the deepest coverts of the glens. The stormy petrels, driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming like black swallows over the bay beneath us. Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging on steadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of Braunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets—you may see the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come up over the gunwale; all craft, large and small, are making for the shelter of the pier. Claude starts this afternoon to sit for six months in Babylonic smoke, working up his sketches into certain unspeakable pictures, with which the world will be astonished, or otherwise, at the next Royal Academy Exhibition; while I, for whom another fortnight of pure western air remains, am off to well-known streams, to be in time for the autumn floods, and the shoals of fresh-run salmon trout. FOOTNOTES {1} _Fraser’s Magazine_, June 1867. {29} _Fraser’s Magazine_, September 1858. {74} The Ripon list of natural flies contains several other species of small Nemouridæ unknown to me, save one brown one, which is seen in the South, though rarely, in June.