A tall straight-limbed young man strode swiftly among the sand-hummocks and came out on the flats, and stood gazing round him, with a great light in his eyes, and a towel round his neck. He had a lean, clean-shaven face, to which the hair brushed back behind his ears lent a pleasant eagerness. But the face was leaner and whiter than it should have been, and the eyes seemed unnaturally deep in their hollows. "Whew!" he whistled, as the wonder of the flats struck home. "A change, changes, and half a change, and no mistake! And all very much for the better--in most respects. The bishop said I'd find it rather different from Whitechapel, and he was right! Very much so! Dear old chap!" It was ten o'clock of a sweet spring morning. The brown ribbed flats gleamed and sparkled and laughed back at the sun with a thousand rippling lips. The cloudless blue sky was ringing with the songs of many larks. The young man stood with his braces slipped off his shoulders, and looked up at the larks. Then he characteristically, flung up a hand towards them, and cried them a greeting in the famous words of that rising young poet, Mr. Robert Browning, "God's in His heaven! All's well with the world!--Well! Well! Ay--very, very well!" And then, with a higher flight, in the words of the old sweet singer which had formed part of the morning lesson--"Praise Him, all His host!" And then, as his eye caught the gleam of the distant water, he resumed his peeling in haste. "Ten thousand souls--and bodies, which are very much worse--to the square mile there, and here it looks like ten thousand square miles to this single fortunate body. . . . That sea must be a good mile away. . . . The run alone will be worth coming for. . . ." He had girt himself with a towel by this time, and fastened it with a scientific twist. . . . "Now for a dance on the Doctor's nose," and he sped off on the long stretch to the water. The kiss of the salt air cleansed him of the travail of the slums as no inland bathing had ever done. The sun which shone down on him, and the myriad broken suns which flashed up at him from every furrow of the rippled sand, sent new life chasing through his veins. He shouted aloud in his gladness, and splashed the waters of the larger pools into rainbows, and was on and away before they reached the ground. And so, to the sandy scum of the tide, and through it to deep water, and a manful breasting of the slow calm heave of the great sea; with restful pauses when he lay floating on his back gazing up into the infinite blue; and deep sighs of content for this mighty gift of the freedom of the shore and the waves. And a deeper sigh at thought of the weary toilers among whom he had lived so long, to whom such things were unknown, and must remain so.