the moan of gorse and the creak of gates and the deeply-taken breath of the tide at the full. Nor was it yet light when the gulls began to wheel and wind and float with a motion like foam on a whirlpool or interwoven snow. They wheeled about the masts of fishing-boats that nodded and kissed and crossed in a steep cove of crags whose black edges were slavered by the foam of the dark sea; and there were no men among the boats or about the grey houses that looked past the walls of the cove to the grim staircase and sea-doors of a black headland, whose perpendicular rocks stood up far out of the reach of the wings fashioned in the likeness of gigantic idols. The higher crags were bushy and scaly with lichen, and they were cushioned upon thrift and bird’s-foot trefoil and white bladder campion. It was a bristling sea, not in the least stormy, but bristling, dark and cold through the slow colourless dawn, dark and cold and immense; and at the edge of it the earth knelt, offering up the music of a small flitting bird and the beauty of small flowers, white and gold, to those idols. They were terrible enough. But the sea was more terrible; for it was the god of whom those rocks were the poor childish images, and it seemed that the god had just then disclosed his true nature and hence the pitiful loveliness of the flowers, the pitiful sweetness of the bird that sang among the rocks at the margin of the kind earth. Now and then the sea will startle by some resemblance to the earth. Thus I have come unexpectedly in sight of it on a strange coast and have not known that it was the sea. A gale from the north-east was blowing, and it was late afternoon in mid-winter. The land was sandy moorland, treeless and dark with iron-coloured heather. A mile away I saw rising up into the sky what seemed a peaty mountain in Cardiganshire, as it would be in a tempest of rain, and it was only when I was near the cliff and could see the three long walls of white waves towards the shore that I knew it was the sea. More common is the calm dark-blue sea in mid-summer, over which go criss-cross bands of lighter hue, like pale moorland paths winding about a moor.