“The sea‐side,” says Gosse, a writer who is both artist and scientist in his powers of description, “is never dull. Other places soon tire us; we cannot always be admiring scenery, though ever so beautiful, and nobody stands gazing into a field or on a hedgerow bank, though studded with the most lovely flowers, by the half‐hour together. But we can and do stand watching the sea, and feel reluctant to leave it: the changes of the tide and the ever rolling, breaking, and retiring waves are so much like the phenomena of life, that we look on with an interest and expectation akin to that with which we watch the proceedings of living beings.” The sea‐ shore, in all its varied aspects, has beauties and characteristics all its own. “How grandly,” says the same writer, “those heavy waves are rolling in upon this long shingle‐beach. Onward they come, with an even, deliberate march that tells of power, out of that lowering sky that broods over the southern horizon. Onward they come! onward! onward! each following its precursor in serried ranks, ever coming nearer and nearer, ever looming larger and larger, like the resistless legions of a great invading army, sternly proud in its conscious strength; and ever and anon, as one and another dark billow breaks in a crest of foam, we may fancy we see the standards and ensigns of the threatening host waving here and there above the mass. “Still they drive in, and each in turn curls over its green head, and rushes up the sloping beach in a long‐drawn sheet of the purest, whitest foam. The drifted snow itself is not more purely spotlessly white than is that sheet of foaming water. How it seethes and sparkles! how it boils and bubbles! how it rings and hisses! The wind sings shrilly out of the driving clouds, now sinking to a moan, now rising to a roar; but we cannot hear it, for its tones are drowned in the ceaseless rushing of the mighty waves upon the beach and the rattle of the recoiling pebbles. Along the curvature of the shore the shrill, hoarse voice runs, becoming softer and mellower as it recedes; while the echo of the bounding cliffs confines and repeats and mingles it with the succeeding ones till all are blended on the ear in one deafening roar.