For a time the nearer sandhills have rested and clothed themselves in bird’s-foot trefoil, thyme, eyebright and short turf: but once the church was buried beneath them. Between the round hill and the church a tiny stream sidles along through a level hiding-place of flags and yellow flag flowers, of purple figwort and purple orchis and green grass. A cormorant flies low across the sky--that sable bird which seems to belong to the old time, the time of badger and beaver, of ancient men who rose up out of the crags of this coast. To them, when the cuckoo first called one April, came over the blue sea a small brown ship, followed by three seals, and out of it descended a Christian from Ireland, black-haired, blue-eyed, with ready red lips and deep sweet voice and spoke to them, all alone. He told them of a power that ruled the blue waters and shifting sands, who could move the round green hill to the rock of the white gulls; taller and grimmer than the cloven headland yet sweet and gentle as the fennel above; deep-voiced as the Atlantic storm, tender also as the sedgewarbler in the flags below the hill; whose palace was loftier than the blue to which the lark was now soaring, milder and richer than the meadows in May and everlasting; and his attendants were more numerous and bright than the herring under a moon of frost. The milkpails should be fuller and the grass deeper and the corn heavier in the car if they believed in this; the pilchards should be as water boiling in the bay; and they should have wings as of the white birds that lounged about the precipices of the coast. And all the time the three seals lay with their heads and backs above the shallows and watched. Perhaps the men believed his word; perhaps they dropped him over the precipice to see whether he also flew like a gull: but here is the church named after him.