Not when the gale is at its height—at any rate along our coast—can you best realise the grandeur of the sea. Study it rather on one of these quiet days of warning, when you can trace a wave almost from its inception, till it curls over at your feet with a dull roar, regular as the boom of a minute gun, and audible for miles inland. Lashed into foam, and its voice drowned by the wind, it parts with much of its majesty, and becomes merely a symbol of turmoil and unrest. What it gains in wildness, it loses in self-control, like the seething rapids of Niagara before they compose themselves into dignity prior to the final plunge. Then came another and a final warning. It was one of those rare sunsets which leave an imprint on the memory for life. Not a sunset in which conflicting colours are fused into each other by soft and subtle gradations—these we see often and soon forget—but one of war and discord; when colours, the most antagonistic, meet without blending, and produce effects that would be called crude and coarse upon a painter’s canvas. On a background of unvarying crimson, black and purple clouds were projected, clean cut in outline, and solid, to all appearance, as the hull of an Atlantic liner that was cleaving her way across the sea beneath them. The sea itself borrowed its colours from the sky, but jealously guarded them from encroaching on the beach beyond, which shone white as silver in the unnatural glow. Beyond it still, the valleys and hills that rose behind Broadwater were painted a dark and luminous green, on which a few scattered homesteads stood out in clear and startling relief. For the moment distance was annihilated, and a step or two, or so it seemed, might have compassed the mile of space that separated us from our own house door. A sunset like this, following upon a “crying” sea, can never be misread by the dwellers on our coast. It warns every fisherman that he must haul his lerret to the very summit of the ridge, and every Coastguard station along the dreaded Bay that it behoves them to be awake and watching. But it was not till midnight that the storm broke upon us. Our faith in the old house was strong. It had outlived so many storms, and the gale of ’24 must have been worse than this, or so we kept saying for mutual encouragement. But it was hard to believe it, and the comfort was quickly followed by a disquieting thought that each year, as it passed, left the chimneys older and less capable of resisting the pressure. We were disquieted, too, for others; we knew well by experience what a night like this might bring us from the sea. Times upon times, in similar gales, we had been hurried to the beach by signals of distress, and had helped the Coastguard, sometimes in saving life, oftener in furthering that painful recall to life which is more agonizing to witness than death itself.