But, in our own home-waters, what marvellous changes take place under the strong continuous pull of the lunar reins. Think of wind and flood-tide on the Channel coasts, with the strange sound as of a murmurous host confusedly marching: think of the daily two-fold flooding of estuaries, and the sinuous invasion of the sea past curving banks and among remote inland meadows. Are rivers not enhanced in mystery when through the downward flow a salt serpentine envoy from the distant sea forces its way, revealing itself in circuitous eddies, in dark revolving rings, in troubled surface-seethe: bringing to the flags and rushes, to the leaning grasses and gold kingcup and purple mallow that salt lip, which a score or half-score miles away had been laid on the sea-grapes of the bladder-wrack, or on the slow-involving tresses of the twisting long-weed. Then there is that miraculous halt, when the cold hand of the tide can reach no farther: when at a boat’s helm a curl of dark brackish water will indolently lapse, while at the prow the clear-brown rippling rush will be fresh with gathered rains and dews and the unsullied issues of wellsprings and sunlit sources. The tide-flow may be more beautiful and obvious seen from the high shores of certain estuaries, as, say, from the Falmouth uplands, or from the hillsides of our narrow Highland sea-lochs, but the mind is deeplier impressed and the imagination compelled by the more obscure, menacing, and almost terrifying swift arrivals along vast shallow estuaries, such as The Wash or the inner reaches of Solway Firth or by the Sands o’ Dee. With what abrupt turbulence the calms are violated, with what a gathering sound the invisible host is marshalled, with what impetuous surge the immeasurable sortie advances! Of a sudden those little shallows in the sands, those little weed-hung pools below slippery rocks covered with mussel and dog-whelk, shiver. A faint undulation thrills the still small world. A shrimp darts from a sand-mound: a blood-red anemone thrusts out feathered antennæ: now one, now another shell-fish stirs, lifts, gapes. It is the response of the obscure, the insignificant, and the silent, to that mighty incalculable force which is hastening from the fathomless depths and across countless leagues of the great Sea. Soon the flood will come: perhaps in furtive swiftness and silence, perhaps with a confused multitudinous noise among which are inchoate cries and fragmentary bewildering echoes of muffled songs and chants, perhaps as in charging hordes of wild sea-horses where the riders are not seen in the dazzle of spray nor their shouting heard in the tumult of wave dashed against wave and billow hurled on billow.