lose stillness of the
night. I say this was all; and, with the memory upon me, I could easily,
at any time, break the second commandment.

I had thought myself fortunate in my lodgings. They were in a most
charming old-world cottage--as I have said on the Parade--and at high
tide I could have thrown a biscuit into the sea with merely a lazy jerk.
My sitting-room put forth a semi-circular window--like a lighthouse
lantern--upon the very pathway, and it had been soothing during the
afternoon to look from out this upon the little world of sea and sky and
striding cliff that was temporarily mine. From the Parade four feet of
stone wall dipped to a second narrow terrace, and this, in its turn, was
but a step above a slope of shingle that ran down to the water.

Veritably had I pitched my tent on the wide littoral of rest. So I
thought with a smile, as I composed myself for slumber.

I slept, and I woke, and I lay awake for hours. Every vext problem of my
life and of the hereafter presented itself to me, and had to be argued
out and puzzled over with maddening reiteration. The reason for this was
evident and flagrant. It had woven itself into the tissue of my brief
unconsciousness, and was now recognised as, ineradicably, part of myself.

The tide was incoming, that was all, and the waves currycombed the beach
with a swishing monotony that would have dehumanized an ostler.

This rings like the undue inflation of a little theme. I ask no pity for
it, nor do I make apology for my weakness. Men there may be, no doubt,
to whom the unceasing recurrent thump and scream of a coasting tide on
shingle speaks, even in sleep, of the bountiful rhythm of Nature. I am
not one of them--at least, since I visited King's Cobb. The noise of the
waters got into my brain and stayed there. It turned everything else
out--sleep, thought, faith, hope, and charity. From that first awakening
my skull was a mere globe of stagnant fluid, for any disease germs that
listed to propagate in.

Perhaps I was too near the coast-line. The highest appreciations of
Nature's thunderous forces are conceived, I believe, in the muffled
seclusion of the study. I had heard of still-rooms. I did not quite know
what they were; but they seemed to me an indispensable part of seaside
lodgings, and for the rest of that night I ardently and almost tearfully
longed to be in one.

I came down in the morning jaded and utterly unrefreshed. It was patent
that I was in no sta