and the other like a blanket, and among
their contents he felt a loaf of bread, and a bottle and a powder-flask.
So he rolled himself up in the blanket and the cloak, and lay wondering
at the strange case in which he found himself, and so at last fell
asleep.

* * * * *

He woke into a dapple of light and shade which filled his wandering wits
with wonder, till, with a start, he came to himself and remembered.

The place he was in was something like a stone bee-hive, about eight
feet across from side to side, with a rounded sloping roof rising at its
highest some four feet from the ground, and the great blocks of which it
was built fitted so ill in places that the sun shot the darkness through
and through with innumerable little white arrows of light. The dark
opening of the night was now a glowing invitation to the day. He shook
off his wraps and crawled out into the open.

And what an open!

He drew deep breaths of delight at the magnificence of his outlook--its
vastness, its spaciousness, its wholesome amplitude and loneliness. He
felt like a new man born solitary into a new world.

The sky, without a cloud, was like a mighty hollowed sapphire, in which
blazed the clear white sun; and the vast plain of the sea, sweeping away
into infinity, was a still deeper blue, with here and there long swathes
of green, and here and there swift-speeding ruffles purple-black.

A brisk easterly breeze set all the face of it a-ripple, and where the
dancing wavelets caught the sun it glanced and gleamed like sheets of
molten silver.

"A silver sea! A silver sea!" he cried aloud, and into his mind there
flashed an incongruous comparison of the bountifulness of Nature's
silver with the pitiful grains they hacked out of her rocks with such
toil and hardship.

Away to the south across the silver sea the Jersey cliffs shone clear in
the sunshine, and on the dimpling plain between, the black Paternosters
looked so like the sails of boats heading for Sark that he remembered
suddenly that he was in hiding, and dropped to cover alongside the great
stones of his shelter.

But careful observation of the square black objects showed him that they
did not move, and anyway they were much too far away to see him. So he
took courage again, and, full of curiosity concerning his hiding-place,
he crept up the southern slope till he reached the ridge of the roof, so
to speak, and lay there looking over, entranced