And, in truth, I am not much the wiser now. There is no great gain in wisdom in the knowledge that the tides are not mysterious creatures of the deep, and are nameless as the winds, as homeless as they, as silent, furtive, as formless, as incalculable almost, as variable. The old islander knew how to turn into service their comings and goings, how to meet them when friendly, how to evade them when hostile, how to wonder continually at their strange beauty, how to reverence the terrible order of their rhythmic flow and ebb. What matter if, also, his old-world Gaelic imagination imaged to him these dark forces of the sea as living creatures; not of flesh and blood as the slim brown seals who, too, can glide not less swiftly and secretly through dusky green water-ways; not even of such consistency as the tide-wrack floating on the wave, or the dim, wandering medusæ which drift like pale, quenchless fires in the untroubled stillness of the twilit underworld; but at least of the company of lightning, of fire, of the wind, of dew, of shadow ... creatures without form as we know form, but animate with a terrible and mysterious life of their own--a secret brotherhood among the visible and invisible clans of the world. What matter if, remembering songs and old tales and incalculable traditions, he thought of them with names, as the ‘fleet-brown-one,’ as ‘swift-darkness,’ as ‘the dark-courser,’ as ‘the untameable,’ as ‘the hound of death’? These tell us neither more nor less (to many of us more, not less) than the abstruse algebraical formulæ of Newton and Laplace. The imagination does not move like flame among intricate calculations, though the mind may be compelled and convinced; and some of us at least would learn more of the tides and their occult nature and laws from an old islesman telling of _lionadh_ and _srùth-mara_ than from the bewildering maze of the five-and-fifty columns which the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ devotes to the subject. Everywhere this tidal mystery, this beauty of flood and ebb, is to be seen ... along whatever coasts sea-waters move or wherever they penetrate. The ‘tideless Mediterranean’ is but a phrase. Even along the shores of Malta and Sicily there is a perceptible rise and fall, and at a thousand points between Marseilles or Tangier and Venice or Cape Matapan the tidal movement is as mysterious and impressive as among the shoals of Ushant or in the Norsk fjords. There are few places where the trained eye could not perceive a difference of rise or fall. I recollect being shown a spot on the Argive coast of the Peloponnesus where, it was said, the tidal difference was non-existent. On that very day, a day of windless calm, I noticed a fall of over a foot in depth. Dark, steep rocks shelved to deep waters, and to all ordinary appearance there was nothing to indicate the slightest variance between flow and ebb. Even a Morean Greek declared ‘there is no flood, no ebb, here.’