He did so. "Now turn round and _look_." He pointed with his finger to a dark figure, now distinctly seen, cowering low at the white cliff's foot. "O Walter, I'm ready; I won't say a word more;" and he leant to his oar, and plied it like a man. It is a pretty, a delightful thing, in idle summer-time to lie at full length upon the beach on some ambrosial summer evening, when a glow floats over the water, whose calm surface is tenderly rippled with gold and blue. And while the children play beside you, dabbling and paddling in the wavelets, and digging up the ridges of yellow sand, which take the print of their pattering footsteps, nothing is more pleasant than to let the transparent stream of the quiet tide plash musically with its light and motion to your very feet; nothing more pleasant than to listen to its silken murmurs, and to watch it flow upwards with its beneficent coolness, and take possession of the shore. But it is a very different thing when there rises behind you a wall of frowning cliff, precipitous, inaccessible, affording no hope of refuge; and when, for the golden calm of summer eventide, you have the cheerless drawing-in of a loud and stormy February night; and when you have the furious hissing violence of rock-and-wind-struck breakers for the violet-coloured margin of rippling waves--knowing that the wind is wailing forth your requiem, and that, with the fall of every breaker, unseen hands are ringing your knell of death. The boy crouched there, his face white as the cliffs above him, his undried limbs almost powerless for cold, and his clothes wetted through and through with spray--pushing aside every moment the dripping locks of hair which the wind scattered over his forehead, that he might look with hollow, staring eyes on the Death which was advancing towards him, wrapping him already in its huge mantle-folds, calling aloud to him, beckoning him, freezing him to the very bone with the touch of its icy hands. And the brutal tide coming on, according to the pitiless irreversible certainty of the fixed laws that governed it--coming on like a huge wallowing monster, dumb and blind--knew not, and recked not, of the young life that quivered on the verge of its advance--that it was about to devour remorselessly, with no wrath to satiate, with no hunger to appease. None the less for the boy's presence, unregardful of his growing horror and wild suspense, it continued its uncouth play--leaping about the rocks, springing upwards and stretching high hands to pluck down the cliffs, seeming to laugh as it fell back shattered and exhausted, but unsubdued; charging up sometimes like a herd of white horses, bounding one over the other, shaking their foaming manes-- hissing sometimes like a brood of huge sea-serpents, as it insinuated it winding streams among the boulders of the shore.