st to-day." This part
of the coast, too, beside being iron-bound, has no port that is easy to
enter, and the tides moreover are very powerful, so that, with either a
gale or a calm, there would be a danger to meet.

It is obvious, of course, to the sailor who reads this that the
difficulty of navigation along such a coast was much increased by my
being alone. An ordinary vessel would put well out to sea, and go on
night and day in deep water with a good offing, and its crew would take
watch and watch until they neared the land again close to their
destination.

But the course of the Rob Roy had to be within seven or eight miles of
the shore, so as to keep within reach of a port at night, or at the worst
near some shallower spot for anchorage; else, in the attempt to sleep, I
might have been drifted twenty miles by the tide, perhaps out to sea,
right away from our course, and perhaps ashore on the rocks. It had not
yet become my plan to pass whole nights at sea as was necessary in the
latter part of this voyage.

With these little drawbacks now and then, which threw rather a graver
tone into the soliloquy of the lonely traveller, it was still a time of
excessive enjoyment. The noble rocks towered up high on the left, and
the endless water opened out wide on the right with only some dot of a
sail, hull down, far far off on the horizon, a little lonely speck fixed
in hard exile; but very probably the crew in that vessel too were happy
in the breezy morn, and felt themselves and their craft to be the very
"hub of the universe."

In a nook of the cliffs was Etretat, now the most fashionable
bathing-place of Northern France. Long pointed pillars of rock stood in
the sea along this shore, one especially notable, and called the "Needle
of Etretat." Others were like gates and windows, with the light shining
through. I thought of looking in here to escape the flood-tide which was
against me, but I was deterred by the Pilot-book telling in plain words,
"The Eastern part of the beach at Etretat is bordered by rocks which
uncover at low water."

The Rob Roy's previous behaviour in a sea made me quite at ease about
waves or deep water, but to strike on a rock would be a miserable delay,
and somehow I became more cautious as to exposing my little craft to
danger the more experience I acquired; certainly also she was valued more
and more each day. This increase together of experience and of
admiration, begetting boldness