The green waves of the Atlantic roll strange flotsam into the sandy bays of that bitter coast; and the sea, hungry though it be, can give up more than the dead. One summer on the bosom of a forgotten sunset, a boat had drifted into Morwen Cove, to strand, when the tide turned, amid the weed and rubbish of the foreshore. In it, swollen with cold, unconscious, nearly dead, lay a waif, the survivor of some obscure wreck. Leadville Byron, a hind who with his childless wife lived over the disused fish-cellars at Wastralls, chanced upon the boat. Its contents stirred the father in him and, as he carried home the bit of human waste, his anxiety was lest it might be reclaimed; indeed he never quite lost his fear that what the sea had given the land, that unknown of towns and country beyond the hills, might take. If inquiries were made, however, they did not reach Trevorrick and the child, a lusty, black-browed youngster, grew to manhood, without further change in his surroundings. His native tongue had been unintelligible to the villagers and he could not give himself a name. His foster-parents, therefore, felt themselves justified in calling him Leadville. If his name were ever discovered he could return to it, meanwhile he was buttressed against the curiosity of strangers. As was only natural the Byrons bred him to work on the land; and at eighteen, Wastralls—the delectable hillside, the edge of cliff, the tumuli of the ancient folk—were all he knew; indeed, it required a cataclysm to prove to him that he was not a clod of Wastralls earth. In outward seeming the lad was not unlike the people among whom he lived. A little more swarthy, with a more sombre expression in his dark eyes, a broader chest than was often seen, he might have passed for a Cornishman. The difference was one of temperament and it was a difference so great, that never to the end of his life was he to be other to them than a ’foreigner.’