the great race' lived and died--whenever that was.
Well, then, for the sake of others you ought not to rush off to that
God-forgotten sea-rock just when you are wanted in town, all for a woman
you last saw a hundred years ago.'

'No--it was only nineteen and three quarters,' replied his friend, with
abstracted literalness. He went the next morning.

Since the days of his youth a railway had been constructed along the
pebble bank, so that, except when the rails were washed away by the
tides, which was rather often, the peninsula was quickly accessible. At
two o'clock in the afternoon he was rattled along by this new means of
locomotion, under the familiar monotonous line of bran-coloured stones,
and he soon emerged from the station, which stood as a strange exotic
among the black lerrets, the ruins of the washed-away village, and
the white cubes of oolite, just come to view after burial through
unreckonable geologic years.

In entering upon the pebble beach the train had passed close to the
ruins of Henry the Eighth's or Sandsfoot Castle, whither Avice was to
have accompanied him on the night of his departure. Had she appeared the
primitive betrothal, with its natural result, would probably have taken
place; and, as no islander had ever been known to break that compact,
she would have become his wife.

Ascending the steep incline to where the quarrymen were chipping just
as they had formerly done, and within sound of the great stone saws, he
looked southward towards the Beal.

The level line of the sea horizon rose above the surface of the isle, a
ruffled patch in mid-distance as usual marking the Race, whence many a
Lycidas had gone

'Visiting the bottom of the monstrous world;'

but had not been blest with a poet as a friend. Against the stretch of
water, where a school of mackerel twinkled in the afternoon light, was
defined, in addition to the distant lighthouse, a church with its tower,
standing about a quarter of a mile off, near the edge of the cliff. The
churchyard gravestones could be seen in profile against the same vast
spread of watery babble and unrest.

Among the graves moved the form of a man clothed in a white sheet, which
the wind blew and flapped coldly every now and then. Near him moved six
men bearing a long box, and two or three persons in black followed. The
coffin, with its twelve legs, crawled across the isle, while around and
beneath it the flashing lights from the sea and the schoo